Dog waggled her tongue and leapt, landed hard on two of the four, the ulna of the left foreleg stopping just short of the elbow, a hobbler she forever after. My last sadness, draped my face like a caul. Even a bruise can deform a young bone. My own body a bent jumble halted in the act of reticence. Girl anatomy is an object lesson, an SOS, a warning to birds never to let the air empty from their bones. I stand near doors, slouch against jambs at odd angles, my spine, my cranium withdrawing behind me. Skeleton, that confidence man, will shed the flesh and skulk away if not held in place by disease. Decoy chicane sitting duck. It’s a question of mortality, said the preacher as the pulpit blazed beneath the ready flint of his fingers. I am tinder to clergymen. The day yellowed, as days do, the sky smudged with God’s indifference, but I was not susceptible. If this is not waste, wasted space, and I’m not saying that it’s not, then what I won’t say is that I want not what I can’t have. What does it mean to squander an absence. He hooked his finger through my distance and it bled like anything. There are no trolleys in Kansas, a fact we lament over lunch when it rains. Apricot, antelope, underling, adenoid, I’m saving myself for Jesus. The thing you have to remember about barnyards, about the shilly-shally of three-legged dogs, is that chickens have a faulty sense of direction when the sky starts to spit and those with a bellyful of mash will mislead a child if given half a chance, lure her off the farm with incantatory clucking and into the forest where emaciated shadows caper, warily, gambol gambol fugitive goats, into that loamy refuge where all the AWOL animals of the world end up. I was such a child.