He let the fire burn down to embers, let the dark envelop him, and stood. Jess stepped to the edge of the trees and looked down to the water. It was a big lake and he could see only the bay and the curve of the wooded shore and he could see that the water held there was nearly glass.
The black mirror floated countless stars, and the stars barely rocked. He lifted his eyes to where they held fast in the depthless sky and he saw among them a satellite sailing swiftly east to west, and he wondered what it might be witnessing in its silent transit. If he himself could be a night bird, like some great horned owl on soundless wings, would he fly north over the next town, over the road beyond it? Randall, that was the name on the map, wasn’t it? Would he want to see? Probably not.
In the days since they had found the bridge over the river blown and no way south he had dreamed hard every night. Dreams on dreams, with segues like swinging bridges. He had dreamed of their house, his house now, but it stood in the sage of some high western desert unprotected by a single tree, and the rail fences were broken, the horses vanished.
In the dream they had more than one horse, but he couldn’t remember how many or if he had asked a neighbor to care for them while he was gone. Because he gone. That was the gut weight of the dream, his own absence from anything like home.
He dreamed the return again and again, a homecoming only as much as an old negative represented the photographed image, a.