I tried to remember how I used to deal with this kind of heartbreak, out in the fake world. But here I couldn’t watch television with my laptop warming my chest like a cat, couldn’t get high, couldn’t buy a beautiful new dress. I treated myself to everything that I wanted, cubes of butter, honey from a spoon, patty-cakes in bacon fat. I tried to cheer myself by splashing into the creek on a hot day and feeling the slow water’s luminous capture. Then I remembered how Bay untied me like a knot, how his fingers stroked me until, like the glass, I was humming in one clear sound.

Every day I woke up and considered if I wanted to keep going; every day I pulled up fewer and fewer reasons, like rifling the algal floor of a depleted wishing well.

Time continued thundering forward. The water in the swollen streams came from ice packed around the roots of trees, snow in the coves and shadows. The faraway ocean sucked it all home, tugged it violently through brimming channels. And every year more of our four-mile-high mountains got dragged along with it.

The ephemerals, the trillium and bleeding hearts, lady’s slippers and crested dwarf hearts, swiftly neared the twilight of their growing season, and the irises and daffodils began to rip open their bulbs. Here came the millions of black summer flies, in the milk, in the whey. When we sliced cheese for dinner, we found their corpses crouched in air-bubble caves produced by their own bacteria.

After dinner, the sheep sat in meadows whose flowers were taller than they were. The milk was at high tide. The strawberries bloomed in a matter of days. The sow swelled like a balloon and gave birth to a litter of ten. They fell out into my hand, one after another. The next day, the piglets nibbled the paws of the sleeping dogs. We dug out the garden, weeded, reaped. The more you harvest, the more you get, because plants are so indefatigable and desperate to get their seeds into the world. Every time you clip a zucchini, the zucchini plant will try again.

Dice told a story about scientists who, for all their technologies, really had no way to check if there was a meteor hiding behind the sun, heading right toward us. And why shouldn’t there be? We’re about due for a mass extinction.

* * *

The longest day of the year came, and our holler was hushed and sedate in the syrupy heat.