H. L. Hix

Except a six-year pony penned from birth inside a barn, I never seen anything worse. Eleven dobermans and mixed breeds, some still pups, removed from a residence after anonymous tips about a dead dog decomposing on the porch. Still and yet, this many dogs almost beats that one horse. The problem of human freedom one might couch in other terms than Kant’s.It’s nasty in there. Dog shit everywhere. I don’t see how she could breathe. The woman, nearly ninety, wept and pleaded with the workers.I’ve been raising dogs right here in this very house since before your mothers were born. If I’m treating these dogs as bad as you say, how come you need those chokers to drag them away? The Humane Society truck’s radio, left on, played “Me and Bobby McGee.”They were strays, unwanted. I fed them and gave them a home. Now you’ll kill them and call me cruel. And who will protect me? How will I sleep? When asked, the welfare worker said the woman cannot be forced from her home. But freedom of will is not freedom from necessity and obligation. The neighbors lost interest soon and left her lawn. Meanwhile a breeze blows in from the Gulf on a girl showing her friends the spot where she lost her left foot to a shark.He kept twisting it like a dog with a rag, she says just to hear them squeal. Really, he only managed to take a chunk and maul the rest, but the doctors had to amputate. She had to learn to trust loss. And in Houston a boy tries to jimmy a padlock with a broom to free his six-year-old sister from the storage shed their parents told them was “the naughty room.” She was causing trouble at school, wetting her bed, and threatening to run away. We made a decision. We thought a few hours here was best for her. Police said the girl had been left water. A person may purchase the wind and the sun at the price of perpetual peregrination.

The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed, joking among themselves, but only moments before they hadn’t been laughing. It had taken all three to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement, they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back: for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him, one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head, at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn. First they bound his wrists, then his ankles. Then it got easier. More tape over his mouth, wound all the way around his head, three full loops, much more than was necessary, which was one thing they were laughing about, the two bigger men making fun of the smaller one, who had done that part of the binding. Then they’d bound him down on the mattress, again with the tape. The bound man continued to struggle, but once the tape denied him movement he felt as if he were thinking clearly, as if his panic had lifted, resistance become mere obligation. He thought surely the tape would run out, but they had another roll, just in case. He noticed the new order—head first this round—when it came to the mattress. One man would lift one end just off the dirt, enough for another to wrap the tape, which cursed coming off the roll in what the man construed as sympathy, all the way around the mattress in loops that included his head and neck, then the same process at the other end, all the way around the mattress and his ankles. They couldn’t figure how to get the tape around his torso because it was so near the middle of the mattress. The bound man found himself wanting to help, but of course he couldn’t speak, and anyway they didn’t need his advice. His hands bound behind his back and against the mattress meant his feet and head, and most of all his neck, were plenty to keep him from getting loose and grabbing one of their guns. The bound man’s life didn’t pass before him in summary, exactly, but he did see things now that in all these years he hadn’t noticed. The wiring, for instance. He thought it must have been his own father who’d wired the barn with that odd blend of pride and makeshift half-competence that showed up in all his father’d made, himself not least. One bare bulb bragging from the highest joist about its white porcelain fixture, but better, really, at casting long shadows than at lighting the place, though if the three men would just leave him alone, he thought, he’d be able to count up all the birds’ nests and speculate on where swallows had built before there were barns. The wire ran from switchbox to fixture in straight lines and right angles, through half-inch galvanized surely intended for plumbing but good, too, for frustrating the rats. It was the short man, the one who’d done all the taping, who then poured kerosene across the mattress and over the man, soaking his clothes, making sure to splash some into his eyes. No one else noticed, but he spelled out fuck with the kerosene. Or anyway swung his arms in that pattern. That was when they could relax a little, the three men, and start their joking, once the kerosene was poured. One tall man slapped his forehead: “You brought matches, right?” “Matches?” the other replied, furrowing his brow and patting his pockets, and both laughed out loud. Even the short man smiled. Barns burn, it turns out, just the way you’d think if you thought about it, hay fast and hot, siding lighting the roof and the flooring of the loft, all the slender strips of wood, with the few parts not tinder— the frame, the beams and joists—starting last and lasting longest. But that’s not what the mattress-bound man’s great-great-grandfather had thought about, its someday burning, as he built the barn. He had a daughter to worry about, and a wife big with what he thought might be a boy. And weather, and a dozen cows. Plenty to fret more immediate than which fuck-up would later taint his bloodline and preside over the decay, finally inviting the sacrifice, of what he had built to last. Barns burn like bonfires built for the burning, stacked just so by one mortal for the next. They burn best at night, whether or not communicants travel up and down billows lit silver from above, red from below. And whether or not three men have stopped among sycamores on the rise just opposite and turned for a moment to admire their handiwork.

As gestures to beckon geometry's end I post letters to my lost Mayan sisters, solicit layers sussed from layers to test history, push past parallel. Mystery becomes you, Mother, as does the lust the rest of us suffer, lust you must once have induced. What perceptions I trust defy perspective. I take my troubles scribbled, not erased.

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this, at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists, numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on, to some next place, but last listened for your voice last night, these long years after, will listen next when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now, as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

It swallows all it swallows, mass mistaken for mass, swallows it all as storm surge swallows swaths of shoreline, offers for the finding after only slivers of glass, deflects off weathered edifice, trickles through tumbledown. Deflects barely, a swallow off the surface of a farm pond. Even on cold nights, not all brilliance mimics the crystalline. Not all wisdom waits, not all that winters winters underground. Unspoken, any summons to silent predation. • I name it Forsakenness Knob, that ridge where wind and loss merge, where what I see looks like something beyond what sight can prove, frost figured as so many bare branches. And omens, my god, so many, like animal tracks, but they merge, blown over by another snow. Body they once were, mind they may since have melted into, omens may they prove.