Starting from the bottom, you work your way up the shadow’s body. The mower practically glides over the ground. Its rotating cylinder rakes its blades through the legs, torso, head, meeting little resistance from the bristly grass. The soil churns up in friable clods. And as the mower masticates the shadow, it spits out bits of it backward, strewing a trail of the silhouette’s confetti. Whatever the silhouette is, the mower pulverizes it. If it is a hypostatized nightmare, then the mower is shredding that nightmare. And if it is a hypostatized madness, then the mower is shredding that madness. This morning, however, you think of the silhouettes neither as hypostatized nightmares nor as madnesses. You think of them as load-bearing columns in the owner’s thought structure: if you demolish them, it will collapse.

You mow the first silhouette in just two passes, once forward and once back. What is left in its place is a piebald pile of green and black grass blades. To the pile’s right, the five remaining silhouettes patiently await their fates. Together, they really do resemble prey in a spider’s web: wrapped tight in their cocoons of silk, in these black shrouds of spray paint. Incubus husks. You ready the mower to unghost them.

After returning the push mower to its place beside the toolshed, you spend the rest of the morning tearing down the dreamcatchers and packing your duffel bag. You pack the dreamcatchers, too. You have decided to take your half of the stipend and leave first thing tomorrow. As for the other half, your compensation will just have to be imagining the look on the owner’s face: the expression he will have on entering the cabin, when he realizes not only that you have not been driven mad but also that you have mercilessly—and, indeed, perfectly sanely—dismantled his prophylactic apparatus, stripping the windowpanes and trimming the silhouettes.

Now it is night, your last in the cabin, and you have been standing at the bedroom window, staring out at the backyard. Beyond the pane, the grass merges into a single sealike mass, and all that can be distinguished in the darkness is the far figure of the toolshed: a shack of corrugated tin lit up by the orange haze of its safety lamp, the push mower visible in silhouette. The only object in the frame, the shed is what you have been focusing on tonight, and what you imagine the owner must have focused on, too, those nights when he stood here staring out the window. The shed stands at the edge of the yard, appearing in the lower left-hand corner of the windowpane. Its roof slants over the entryway in a slight lip, sheltering it, and affixed to this soffit is the safety lamp: a single bulb burning in a casing of translucent plastic. The casing casts a widening cone of rust-toned light before the shed, washing it a granular red. Because the shed emerges from the black grasses and from the window frame stained this blood-orange color, it recalls the horizon rutilance of a rising moon. In the sky tonight there is no moon. The only source of light is the shed itself, glowing alone in the broader darkness.