Vortex

The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun of late to fill with them, a settling that commences with dusk. The widows complain — claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot sleep. And so you form a committee, convening with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling congregation. Every night, the air resounds with that resolve, and every dusk they return with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex around a drain, an old appointment they keep with an inescapable place; this argument no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.