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Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

He sent this key from Florida.

I think. A key to what?

I tried the car, the trucks,

tried every door – nothing fit.

My wife thought it was his idea

of a joke. I never got his jokes.

Not a word from him, just things:

a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;

a snapshot of himself from Aspen,

arm in arm with somebody, but

both faces had been scissored out.

A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.

Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,

collect, and I knew it was him,

though he always used a different name.

At times enough to make you laugh:

Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,

will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.

Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We

were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,

thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was

Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth

an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or

was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets

together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,

such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow

from a shinbone.

For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.