Inside was a man from the neck up. He wore a white collar and a black coat and he had a head full of rich hair. His face was stiff as stone beneath the glass, but I could see how it might move. It seemed to me he’d been thinking of a woman when the photographer ducked beneath his dark cloak.

Maybe the man cut his face out and applied paste to the back. Maybe he pressed it in, snugged the glass, shut the dome—then fixed the clasp to the woman’s neck. Let’s hope he lifted her hair so as not to snare it. Let’s hope he lowered his lips there. On her nape, from the chain, the woman felt a light, cold, creeping prick.

The locket shone like a small sun before it dulled into something more earthbound. When it slid across the woman’s skin, she thought of the man inside. Sometimes she moved just to feel it.

I walked home with the thing tangling in my pocket. When I arrived, the locket was warm as my thigh.

I worked as a mail clerk at a warehouse that cut small discs of tin. All day long the pieces rained ringing down the chutes. The air tasted sour and sharp like blood when you opened your mouth. The man who ran operations had skin that flushed red while he worked. His arms were covered in coarse yellow hair that caught the silver shavings as they fell like sparks from the machines.

I’d stand at my station, sorting. He’d walk past with a speed that disturbed my clothes—my skirt a sweep of fingertips, my shirt a hand that traveled up my back. My hair lifted and sighed into place again.

The letters lay limp while I listened for his step. It seemed I could hear the smallest sound from a great distance. When I drove home in the evening, I took the long way through dried-up fields. I found dependable pleasure in the yield of the gas pedal to my foot. The life in me—it always pulsed harder the closer it came to its end.

THE HUNGRY VALLEY

The old horse had hobbled hooves and a doubled middle because the man fed it too much rich corn. The old dog’s back was broad and thin of hair like a threadbare piece of overstuffed furniture, yet the man continued to drizzle its kibble with bacon grease. The cats lapped milk he poured into pie tins on the barn floor and they ate the rats that ate the sacks of rich corn, so they, too—the cats as well as the rats—were quite fat.

On the dog’s ears, ticks sucked themselves big as grapes. Burly black flies drank from the flanks of the horse. Mosquitoes and fleas got their blood meal from the most convenient body.

When the veterinarian gelded the horse—quickly, with a corroded blade—the man sat on the horse’s head. Then the vet tossed what he’d cut to the man’s dogs—different ones then, who fought over the hot, wet heap.