It was getting strange with Annie. They had started to touch but didn’t know how far they wanted to go. They kissed with their eyes open, questioning. Strange to kiss when they had known each other so long. She said she wished she could be inside him. He knew, though, that inside was the awful heart, the blood. Two days ago in the old tobacco barn they went farther than they had ever gone before. He hadn’t wanted to kiss her, only her lips; not even her mouth, salty, oily with the popcorn they had shared. He laid her down in slats of shadow and sun: shadow across her neck, sun across her mouth, shadow across her eyes. High above them, an empty hornet hive, once a heart. He wanted her to be still, but she struggled. Trying, gently, to hold her away, he felt the octopus at his nape, its tentacle in his throat. After wrestling herself on top of him, she took off her dress: light across her neck, darkness across her mouth, light across her eyes. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the barn wall. She touched her nipple to his mouth. He wanted this and didn’t, the nub hardening against the tip of his tongue, the skin of her small breast so smooth. He had never felt anything smoother. Its exact heft, filling the palm of his hand, unlocked his limbs: ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows, their chambers turning. She stretched up above him, her throat in darkness, her open lips in light, and he could see the ribbed roof of her mouth. She had been clasping her hair above her head with one hand; she released it so it tumbled around his face. He tried again to hold her away, his limbs loosed, but between his legs the clench of it, aching. Reaching down, she pressed her hand there, causing that coarse knot to slip, only to snarl even more tightly. It was the most wonderful pain he had ever felt. But again the tentacle scratched in his throat, and the images came: Alvin’s deer skull; the torn-off coyote leg in the trap; the rabbit in Tatmeyer’s bean field, which had been skinned and left, covered in flies; the cardinal chick that had fallen into his face at Cedar Hills. He slipped into the place between life and death, murderous Annie in her bands of light and shade, her mouth open, her breast so soft, the barbed hook of her nipple in his mouth, those strange sounds she made. She was all loss. She was everything: He felt no love for himself or his life. But she was the inside, the innards, the place where the butcher sank his hands to warm them in winter. He didn’t want to broach, just to hold her, fragile and terrible. That’s when he had lifted her, carrying her to the barn entrance, holding her against the jamb, trapping her body as she trapped his life. Her left half was in shadow, her right half in light, one breast taut, the other slack and blind.