Our most persistent nightmare is of aftermath and a child patrolling the silent shells of buildings, the city a kingdom of loose curtains, eyeless high-rises, and nowhere a home for smoke. Understand, it’s not as if we left him there. His shoes are sturdy and he has no need for food. If I gave him a curfew and nothing else, not even a pack of matches, you wouldn‘t worry. You’d watch him lay hands against the flanks of buildings, watch him turn to the white-eyed shapes of statues and give comfort with his permanence-- the way the living watch the grieving and weigh them down with fingerprints, with a blood contract for more stories and blankets of wild breath.

Not your corrugate door they knocked on, not your hand, your feet, through the coos all the way out to the dust and heat- center of a field, not your not listening to mothers, who sat when you didn’t sit, not you watching and the string of girls one by one unstrung, one by one to the baobab shade to the spread malan to be spread. And how many elders needed, and whether they glanced where you weren’t the stranger, would you say something, would you stay their hand, would you stay. And the arms held down, you don’t know, you weren’t there, they might have gripped their knees and been willing, eager even, you don’t know what girls there grow up thinking: this is the way to a husband, this is the way to the rest of their lives, this is the way to be clean. All their friends, and just one votive bleeding to keep from feeling anything, much, ever and ever again, and the elders watching, and the sounds of the village, the pounding, the pounding, and the day and their mothers, they’ve done this, they’re waiting, and the blanket is ready to wrap them in, so they let go, and they let, their letting.

In the dream worth keeping we’re watching both windows, view of constant tenuousness, branches quivering with just- landing or the push preceding flight, who can say. We’re told they mate for life; we would too, if we had wings. But how, when so much surrounding us is ground, meaning once even this stillness we walk on was grinding, skin, saliva, bone, and leaf and the chaff is older than any standing.