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She’s still wearing the same checkered dress as the last tiroaning and bovine:

I’ in her hand, pointed in an aard underhand at Temple

Only after Teun

Terown grass of the front lawn

So you feel all the way through you She feels it in her toes, and behind her eyes, and in her knees, which are already wet froh her pants, and in deeper places still

So, and when she puts a hand to her chest and looks at her fingers, she knohat it is There’s blood She’s leaking out life through a hole Here in the ghost town suburb of Point Co away

There is no pain--just travel

On her knees, she stays still as a supplicant ready for communion It is very quiet All of a sudden, there is no hurry There will be ti For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back fros too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth froain

It is spread out before her, cole moment She will be able to see it all--if she can keep her sleepy eyes open

It’s like a dream where she is Like a dream where you find yourself underwater and you are panicked for a er need to breathe, and you can stay under the surface forever

She feels her body falling sideways to the ground It happens slow--and she expects a crash that never co and it doesn’t knohich way is up anymore, like the moon above her and the fish below her and her in between floating, like on the surface of the river, floating between sea and sky, the world all skin, all meniscus, and she a part of it too

Moses Todd told her if you lean over the rail at Niagara Falls it takes your breath away, like turning yourself inside out--and Lee the hunter told her that one time people used to stuff thee

And she is there too, floating out over the edge of the falls, the roar of the water so deafening it’s like hearing nothing at all, like pillows in your ears, and the water exactly the te and the water is falling, and the water is justis just s thatout and down over the falls, down and down, and it takes a long tireat , and so she is held there, spinning in the air, her eyes closed because she’s spinning on the inside too, down and down

She wonders will she ever hit the bottom, wonders will the splash ever cood, and he knows things about infinities Infinities are warood and evil, they’re just peaceful-like and calo eventually, and they are round everywhere you look because you can’t have any edges in infinities

And also they

15

Moses Todd stuirl’s kneeling body fall gently to the ground--like a house of cards that crumples beautifully, soundlessly, with the coirl

No, he says beneath his breath

Then he sees the un still held in an aard underhand

No, godda strides and tears the gun froainst her bony ribs and fires twice into her chest

She sturound, the blood already beginning to make red flowers on her checkerboard dress

Goddairl and firing three more shots into her torso where she is luround

It was just us, he says, not sure exactly what he means It was her and me

He fires once irl’s head He wishes he could kill her again, kill her over and over until the terrible surge in him subsides Until all the fury and fear and love and loss in his chest gets scrubbed aith the cleansing grit of violence

He walks back to where his girl lies on her side in the grass He crouches over her and puts his fingers to her delicate white throat to check for a pulse, but there is none, as he knew there would not be He brushes the hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear