The people of Patagonia still kill things and eat them, and grow things and eat them, and ride horses through scrubby valleys toward fires distant and necessary. If there is a sky above then there is wind, a child's giggle and then the roar of a Norse beast and now gentle again, but never abating, never giving quarter, as if the door to winter's kiln is propped open and the Old Man dead beside it.

Cruel spires and granite faces rise hard into the belladonna light of…

The moon's reflection floated in the middle of the pond like some ancient precious thing, waiting for a worthy heart to come and lift it free.

Two months of cotton cutting his hands and lawn mower carbuerators and the delicate process of ingratiation through ambiguity, but it was familiar terrain by now and he navigated it surely as a barracuda through a reef. Which backs to slap and which to pat, when to waive payment for an odd job, a grin and a wink and a "God bless you"…

He came from black water and rust, hard by the Gulf in one of those soppy flat places where secrets and moss hang in the trees and the wolves have kindness in their eyes and the fat sky weighs on the land. When he was a child, his mother hit him in the head with a piece of firewood for leaving the refrigerator door open and he'd laid in the yard for a day, listening to the music of the blood in his veins and watching the tendrils of monstrous things grow across the backs of his eyelids and…