The sycamores out front.

Under my tires the street sounded wet, and every few hundred feet fallen leaves would loose themselves from the slick asphalt, kicked up by my passing like clumps of clay, into the soft, dewy median that stood as a stoic divide between east and west, despite the season. With my windows cracked, and the thump of anticipation pulsing from speaker to fingertip, the wind ushered in scents of musk, and decay, and peppercorn, and autumn. And I gave a silent thanks to Whomever was looking out, for the early and sudden departure our northern landscape had taken, into itself.

My heart stirred with restlessness, and the old fairytale song the radio selected of fox and crow and baker made me convulse to my core. I caught a glimpse of myself, reflected from streetlight onto window glass, and the vision it cast on my mind was the wiry frame of the girl in the Cheerios t-shirt. Wind-swept and sunned, with always the one wild lock curling away from the rest. The next passing streetlight betrayed a much older, slicked-down version of the feral soul. And the fox went on in his subtle persuasions....

I got a letter in the mail from someone whom I helped. When it happened it was no big deal, in my retelling of the events. A call came out, I was a few blocks away, Grace made it so that I was there in seconds to watch myself climb out of the car, yelling at the bad guy to put the bat down. He did, and as always, when I dig into my bag of tricks for the grown up voice, I am amazed that it works. It was just something that happened, a solitary event in a string of calls for service. Like my sister, it was just one switch that I managed to flip in a night where it was mostly dark. The letter was all broken English, to the point of being painfully ironic. I always knew that Lenny wasn't supposed to survive in this world. There are some things that are just too fragile, to naive, and when you encounter them they make your bones weak. And if you nod your head in understanding then you have been there. And if not...

He described what he felt, being trapped, and what he thought his only recourse would have been, flawed as maybe his perspective was. He pictured himself crawling to the floor of his van, head underneath the backseat to protect the most important of his ephemeral organs, while the bat swung up and down like a pendulum from a nightmare. Where time slows down and you see everything unfold in perfect detail, but are powerless to prevent a second of it.

And finishing the letter I stood still for a moment. Rain pitter-pattered off of the metal roof overhead, and the hiss of radio static next to my left ear punctuated the heaviness of the world that was pressing in on my back, my shoulders. I realized something I had not before. As I drive in, there is a stretch of highway which is some kind of catalyst in my mind. As soon as I cross over it I begin a measured out number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys until I feel sated and begin pleading my case. Mostly it is that if something tragic has to occur let it at least be understood, and always there is the moment when I plead for just a second to come and tell her that everything is okay, and that there is a reason, even if it is impossible to understand.

Love is more thicker than forget, more thinner than recall, more seldom than a wave is wet, more frequent than to fail.

And in the end the fox gets his share of the goods and I find myself again in the early morning blackness, navigating streetlights from end, to end. How we walk the line, and do not even consider its existence.

I ramble, but permit me, as I have had far too little sleep and perhaps too much waking for rumination and self-deprecation. There is regret, surely there is. I wear it like a brand across my chest. But we have to get up and dust ourselves off anyway. You do not have to be good, remember. You are, at least, unencumbered.