porch, nine miles from the nearest beach. I knew strawberry spring had come again when I started
home from work last night and had to turn on my headlights against the mist that was already
beginning to creep out of the fields and hollows, blurring the lines of the buildings and putting fairy
haloes around the street lamps.
This morning’s paper says a girl was killed on the New Sharon campus near the Civil War cannons.
She was killed last night and found in a melting snowbank. She was not she was not all there.
My wife is upset. She wants to know where I was last night. I can’t tell her because I don’t remember. I
remember starting home from work, and I remember putting my headlights on to search my way
through the lovely creeping fog, but that’s all I remember.
I’ve been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the
lovely shadows without shape or substance. And I’ve been thinking about the trunk of my car – such an
ugly word, trunk – and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to open it.
I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last
night.
And oh dear God, I think so too.