I look over at Dad who’s asleep in his chair. It’s been a longer day than he’s used to, and I’m glad he’s decided to sleep over. There’s pink light from the fire coloring up his forehead and cheeks. It’s extravagant looking, rich, and I can’t decide whether it makes him look very old or young like a boy.

Sally sits close to me. Earlier, while the men were doing the dishes and the kids were tearing around the house, I told her I was thinking of going back to work as soon as possible, not waiting till next fall after all. She listened hard. She has a lot of strong curiosity about her. “Don’t rush,” she said. “Work is only work.”

“One more?” Dennis asks us, and balances another pin delicately on its side in the glowing ashes. It flares, catches, glows, splits open and dies. I pay attention to it. Usually I’m so preoccupied, so busy, I forget about this odd ability of time to overtake us. Then something reminds me. Cemeteries—they stop me short, do they ever stop me short—and old buildings and tree stumps, things like that. And the sight of burning fires, like tonight, like right now, this minute, how economical it is, how it eats up everything we give it, everything we have to offer.

Milk Bread Beer Ice

Milk Bread Beer Ice

“What’s the difference between a gully and a gulch?” Barbara Cormin asks her husband, Peter Cormin, as they speed south on the Interstate. These are the first words to pass between them in over an hour, this laconic, idle, unhopefully offered, trivia-contoured question.

Peter Cormin, driving a cautious sixty miles an hour through a drizzle of rain, makes no reply, and Barbara, from long experience, expects none. Her question concerning the difference between gullies and gulches floats out of her mouth like a smoker’s lazy exhalation and is instantly subsumed by the hum of the engine. Two minutes pass. Five minutes. Barbara’s thoughts skip to different geological features, the curious wind-lashed forms she sees through the car window, and those others whose names she vaguely remembers from a compulsory geology course taken years earlier—arroyos, cirques, terminal moraines. She has no idea now what these exotic relics might look like, but imagines them to be so brutal and arresting as to be instantly recognizable should they materialize on the landscape. Please let them materialize, she prays to the grooved door of the glove compartment. Let something, anything, materialize.