He woke in the night, his mouth caked with slime and again his body hurt too much to move. He lay there, the mound of tires and batteries in front of him, that in the gloom looked as if it belonged to the landscape, just a low rise of the earth. He tried to clear his mouth out but no spit came as he coughed and swished his tongue around. He had been without water for two days. He stood on his feet and swayed, his head reeling. He covered his index finger with the tattered cuff of his shirt and rubbed along the outside of his teeth. His mouth felt smoother and he smacked his tongue against his teeth. Despite his cleaning efforts it still felt dry and swollen. He shook the white cheese that had lodged in his shirt cuff free and stared into the night.

The clouds were gone and with no moon visible the stars shone clear and strong down between the treetops. There was no wind to stir his lingering breath or the mute trees. Ahead he saw an orange glow in the sky, just a tint to the purplish night that Simon figured had to be the lights of a city. He hitched up his sagging jeans, stiff with dirt and sweat, tested his bad leg inside the boot like spoiled meat left too long under plastic, and began walking slowly toward the reflection of civilization, the excess of other people’s lives leaking into the sky. As he passed the tires he saw a thin section of whitewall that had been torn from the tire main. He stopped for a moment, tested it for strength and palmed the moss-eaten piece for steel belting that could possibly cut him. Finding none, he sat down, tore another long strip of cloth from the remainder of his shirt and tied the piece of tire to the bottom of his bare foot as best he could, looping the ragged cloth between his toes and around his heel. He felt foolish and looked around him in the tree-crowded dark, but there were no witnesses. He stood and tested the vulcanized sandal, and seeing that it worked, he picked up his walking stick and shuffled down the hill and disappeared into the woods.

He couldn’t tell if he was walking in a straight line. It wasn’t that the ground was uneven and at every step he winced as his feet sank into burrows of animals out scavenging in the night. Though this, too, made Simon curse under his breath. It wasn’t these things that made Simon stop and wonder, as he craned his neck each way toward the openings in the branches above as if he were stuck in the bottom of some arboreal well. It was the succession of trees—