ABSTRACT
The woman sat. She sat on a porch under the roof of an old white house, with a massive oak before her, apple trees and plum trees and peach trees to the right and left, a grape arbor at the edge of the backyard, and an abandoned chicken coop at the other end near an empty smokehouse. She sat in a wicker-bottomed rocking chair like some grim guardian, peering into the late-September air as if searching for the place where the air gives way.
