An Example

Where can the dead hope to stash some part of themselves, if not in the living? And so when I had a daughter, I gave her your name. She does not use it. She goes by a silly, other thing she was called once in fun, and then often enough that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill- eyed toys — to them each, she has given her given name, and so it is you I hear her again and again calling to. It is your name she shrieks to the bale-head farmer, the woven goat, the cop made of buttons and rags. Your name, to the squat gray dog on wheels, tipping on its side as she drags it by a red string. That dog, always prone and pulled along, as though constantly being killed and paraded through town to make an example. What did it do — Whatever it did, don’t do it.