Soon the garden drowns in its own slow music. Night unleashes terror by extinguishing the boundary between what is and what could be.

Also, stars are being lit, one by one, to illuminate a path with light both dead and living.

Soon these ancient fires will plunge soundlessly into ponds and puddles, roll and thresh atop lakes and rivers, toss in the folding seas until doused by the arrival of a curtained flame into which we shall all be born again.

But only for a day.

Another night passes, a rolling wave that never breaks.

Morning stirs in a long room of milk and pencils, paper, wax, and apples, soft and dented. There are rows of children at pale wooden desks. One gentle, sculpted face turns to the window, anesthetized by the silent fury of cloud.

Soon rain is lashing at the glass; children stir as the drops anoint all living things, equally, without requiring a single thing in return. That’s why they want to play in it: rain proves the benign power of smallness.

The girl yearns to rush outside. Stomp in puddles. Feel her feet swallowed by something invisible but all around. A tension untethered. But the teacher is tapping the desk with her hand. Heads turn back to the front of the classroom⁠—to the shadows mistaken for things themselves.

This teacher is the opposite of trees and worms: she understands everything but knows nothing. Though what she yearns to say is what she feels⁠—that nature knowingly creates things it will inevitably lose control of, and that what appears to be chaos is just order unfurling.

The teacher is speaking now. Her words are leaves blown through a village of small houses with closed doors.

The teacher sometimes writes at home. It’s quiet there with only memory clattering in the distance. And always in the same chair. Feet tucked under. A cat on her lap like a fuzzy comma. Tea cooling upward.

Unspooling dark, her pen scratches paper like a sculptor’s tool, whittling excess. It is this person, the one who tears open words to look inside with blazing eyes and lips mute but moving, that the children want to meet. It is this person they can learn from. They sense her, of course; it is the only reason they listen now, out of sympathy for the prisoner.

Outside, the sky is a bruise torn open.

Rain breaks up the day, divides it into pieces small enough for a pocket, the back of a hand, the fabric of a shoe, a splinter of eyelash.

And here is the father in between patients:

Polished shoes round and black as a dog’s nose.

One hand holds a telephone while the other writes.