He Had A Moment Of Clarity About

Well, As My Dad Would Say, It Means She’s Out Of This Shithole.

Each Time I Told My Story, I Lost A Bit, The Smallest Drop Of Pain.

These Were The Lovely Bones That Had Grown Around My Absence: The Connections-sometimes Tenuous, Sometimes Made At Great Cost, But Often Magnificent-that Happened After I Was Gone. And I Began To See Things In A Way That Let Me Hold The World Without Me In It. The Events That My Death Wrought Were Merely The Bones Of A Body That Would Become Whole At Some Unpredictable Time In The Future. The Price Of What I Came To See As This Miraculous Body Had Been My Life.

At The Tips Of The Feathers There Is Air And At Their Base: Blood. I Hold Up Bones; I Wish Like Broken Glass They Could Court Light....still I Try To Place These Pieces Back Together, To Set Them Firm, To Make Murdered Girls Live Again.

I Couldn't Help But Think, As I Watched Him, Of The Barrels Of Toxic Fluids That Had Accrued Behind Hal's Bike Shop Where The Scrub Lining The Railroad Tracks Had Offered Local Companies Enough Cover To Dump A Stray Contaner Or Two. Everything Had Been Sealed Up, But Things Were Beginning To Leak Out. I Had Come To Both Pity And Respect Len In The Years Since My Mother Left. He Followed The Physical To Try To Understand Things That Were Impossible To Comphrehend. In That, I Could See, He Was Like Me.