He goes to the Moore farm. Same road, same time of night. Hasn’t been. Since. Familiar but in a strange way, like something in a movie coming to life, the sagging porches, the abandoned Waffle House, all the dense oak and ash and in between the shadow of the mountains. Stands at the edge of the driveway. Little red eye of the camera in the tree. It’s okay. You can see me. I can see you. No mask this time. He doesn’t go past the house, stays in the mouth of the drive. Can hear them from here. Rustle. Rattle. Fur against fur, fur against steel. New babies in the nesting boxes. What’s it like. Never to belong to yourself. Maybe we all know. That’s why we kill ourselves. Poison the world you can’t have, that doesn’t want you, that knows. What a virus you are. On the face of the earth. Moore’s white truck a ghost in the night, glowing. He can still feel the teeth through the glove, the claws, if you free them then they are free to kill. Free to die another kind of death. A light switching on over the porch. Moore’s face in the window. Calm. They look at each other. Wind stroking Xie’s face. Here you can still see the stars. Not like in the city. They don’t care about what happens. They go on burning whether or not you know their names, arrange them into shapes, make them into a story. If you look at the sky you see how much coldness there is in the way everything was created. But if you dig, the dirt is always warm. A burning at the heart of the earth. And everything stuck somewhere in between the deep freeze and the fire. Moore holding down a slat in the blinds. Unpanicked. He was never your absolute enemy; he, too, is merely living, the way he knows how. But when the trees are safe and your father is no longer responsible for what you do you will come back, here, to do more than just look. Moore in the yellow frame of the window. Touching two fingers to his brow in a salute.

The letter did not give a time; the truck could come today, or today, or today. There is nothing to do but wait. The body in his arms, in bed, for the first time without pleasure. Look into the eyes, which can never again look back. It is not you. Not yet. Play cards with your dad. Watch the news. Make dinner. Jo calls, Peter calls; you don’t answer. Knee never stops trembling. Won’t he come? Now that you’ve done it, shouldn’t he see. The woods as you both have made them?

Off the road the first two hundred trees are marked with orange plastic tied around their trunks. Ends snapping in the breeze. He strokes the warm, slick ribbons. Tries to tear off a piece; the plastic stretches, whitens, but remains. He lets it go. How hot the day is. Dry. His lips burning. Blackbirds jumping from branch to branch. There are tracks in the dirt, from where the men dragged their boots, the door of their truck ajar on the road. Glint of silver inside, all the teeth of the saw. Don’t cry. Jo sobbing in the hall. Erik alone by the lake. Karen in the car. Leni shutting the broken screen. The tides turning red on one coast, black on the other. Alias’s mountains slashed to the quick. P. pinning him against the trunk of the tree. Hip-to-hip. What was the name of the lamb? It never had one.