Jo McDougall

It is just as well we do not see, in the shadows behind the hasty tent of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show, Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini in Nikes and jeans sharing a tired cigarette before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets and snaps the tigers into rage, before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund and makes from air the white and trembling doves, the pair.

As I drove into town the driver in front of me runs a stop sign. A pedestrian pulls down his cap. A man comes out of his house to sweep the steps. Ordinariness bright as raspberries. I turn on the radio. Somebody tells me the day is sunny and warm. A woman laughs and my daughter steps out of the radio. Grief spreads in my throat like strep. I had forgotten, I was happy, I maybe was humming "You Are My Lucky Star," a song I may have invented. Sometimes a red geranium, a dog, a stone will carry me away. But not for long. Some memory or another of her catches up with me and stands like an old nun behind a desk, ruler in hand.

My son and I walk away from his sister’s day-old grave. Our backs to the sun, the forward pitch of our shadows tells us the time. By sweetest accident he inclines his shadow, touching mine.