Here in the snow, in the woods, there is black, there is white, and endless shades between, but none of the colors have names. This tree trunk: a burgundy-infused pigeon gray. And this one: a black illuminated with evergreen, verging here and there on purple. These slips of dry weed sticking up through the snow: a coppery blush aspiring to be gold. But mainly the world is white. And whiter every second, as clouds of windblown snow unroll between the leafless trees. The flakes strike my cheeks gently, then melt: cold—but in that good way that makes me feel alive. My nose is cold, too, but stinging and sometimes numb. Every now and then, I have to take off my gloves and hold the tip of my nose until it stops sucking the heat from my fingers.

He runs into someone who mentions that a woman in town has disappeared. As soon as he hears her name, he asks, Where did she come from?

The city, I think.

What about before that?

I don’t know.

It’s just that I used to know someone with that name … In California. San Francisco.

I don’t know. I guess it’s possible she lived there before.

Yeah … But … I don’t know …

It’s not exactly an uncommon name.

No …

 
The first thing the magician needs to know is that, at any given moment, almost the entirety of the stage and, indeed, of his own person, is invisible to his audience. The second thing he needs to know is how to direct the attention of his audience toward the least significant of his gestures. And the last thing he needs to know is that his audience wants nothing more than to be deceived. Once these three facts have been grasped, miracles become possible.

So the alpaca was only a ruse to get me out of the house.

I have just read a review of a book by someone I know vaguely. It is a memoir of his young wife, who died in a bicycle accident when they had only been married for six months. The reviewer says, “Mostly this is an evocation of the astoundingly vital phenomenon that was Regina Daglian.” So now I am wondering if my acquaintance could have written such a good book had his lost love been neither astounding nor vital. Or, is that the wrong question? After all, had she only been ordinary—over-freckled, or a tad plump, or someone whose anxiety morphs too easily into rage—wouldn’t the very intensity of his love still signify some truly distinct aspect of her character, something that made her, alone among all the women in his life, the one he wanted to marry? Or is that also the wrong question? Could it be that the entire book is a lie, that this person I hardly know is only being sentimental, mythologizing the woman to whom he was married so briefly in order to grant some beauty and meaning to her death? Maybe he can’t stand to think that he could suffer so deeply over someone who was only one of the countless ordinary people who populate this earth, forgettable by anyone’s standards, even his own.

I sat on the back porch watching the fireflies make their silent, yellow-green flares. There were three, then six, then maybe nine in my own yard, but down the hill, in the swampy meadow between my house and the river, there were hundreds more, maybe thousands. Dragonflies seem made for flight; their darting, their hovering—all effortless joy. But the flight of fireflies is laborious, unsteady, slow. Their wing-shells cocked up and out, their abdomens dangling, they churn though the dark, making a faint sound, halfway between fizz and flutter. But every few seconds, they glow. They speak to one another with light.

Where do you want this?

Just put it in the front.

Could you help me?

Uh … Sure.

Here. Just slip the end through that loop … Right there. Yeah. Perfect … Now … Now do the same thing there.

Here?

Great … Oops. Missed. Can you reach it? …

I …

Never mind.

No … I’ve got it.

Thanks. Okay … Just a little more. Okay … That should do it.

Good.

Uh … Yeah. Perfect.

…

The house was still standing, but most of the furniture on the ground floor had been washed right out of it. All the rugs, all the chairs, the bookshelves, the photographs—gone. The kitchen table had drifted the whole length of the house and now lay on its side, its top smack up against the open front door, and behind it, a shoal of stinking mud, out of which stuck a broom handle and the squirt top of the hand soap bottle that had once stood on the sink in the downstairs bathroom.

My igloo is a cycle trapper be fuzz rat no blotter cap. As ague, as man, so undersea, so bumble the flutes. Have dark no tall pennies? No rabbits egress? We smart never what our tall houses ask. Rumble questioning, the act before the brainpan soda smack. We newly daily dry. Oh stiff pain bucket am I am. Is it not my start, mystery flats? Never have I the sigh game reducer? Artless go by the stump yellows, pocket the flit and fly. We have so sad December make. Not imaginary, mostly my soulsick.

Clint was not a real man. He had been constructed as an experiment by a team of professionals, whom he occasionally encountered on the beach, or in the pine forest where he liked to wander. These were real human beings—men and women—or so they informed him. He noticed differences between them and himself. For one thing, they were a lot smaller. Clint could easily look down on the balding head of the tallest man. For another, they changed over time. The tall man grew balder year by year, and the hair that had remained on his head grew gray and then white and wispy. The man changed so much over the years, that Clint might never have recognized him, had he not watched the process step by step. All of the real human beings went through a similar process, and one by one they disappeared. Some of them would wave and say, “Sweet dreams! See you in the morning!” Then he would never see them again. One of them said she was “retiring,” but Clint had only the vaguest sense of what that word meant. It seemed to have something to do with being “tired,” and “tired” had something to do with not being able to move or speak in a normal way. But beyond that, Clint was in the dark. He had been given the power of speech, but the truth is that he rarely used it, as he was almost always alone, even when the experiment he had been constructed for was underway. That experiment had been abandoned long ago, however. Clint thought it had been a failure, but wasn’t sure.

This is a great truck.

Thanks.

How long you had it?

Oh … I don’t know … It’s … It’s … I don’t know. A long time.

It’s a great truck.

Yeah.

…

Perfect day.

Yeah.

Sunshine … and …

Yeah.

…

…

Mrs. Gilcrest has never learned to swim, thus can only imagine herself the beneficiary of some sort of miracle when she wakes in the sharp grass atop a dune just up from where the waves thunder and hiss. Her shoes are gone. There are scrapes on her elbows and calves, but otherwise she seems unharmed. Even her dress is mostly dry—at least on the back. She was lying on her stomach when she woke, so the front of her dress is still damp and sand-crusted. She swats her belly and thighs, sweeping the sand off, then gets to her feet. The air is warm, the breeze like silk against her cheek. She shades her eyes with her hand as she looks up and down the beach, but can’t decide which way she should walk.