A man holds his child over the welded metal barrier keeping the crowd back from the slope of the Grand Canyon. She dangles there like a leaf clinging to a branch in autumn, screaming or maybe laughing, in the grip of wind, not ready to let go. But from your vantage point it’s very hard to tell. You’re thinking of the cat you left behind, who’s feeding her, who is loving her? Is winter come yet, is she warm? And if there is an afterlife, the man who smiles in the courtroom sketch, that charcoal rendering, when he is told he is guilty, what will he say, now, here at the precipice to the people standing next to him. To the child’s mother. To his own tree rooted beyond the next valley.