WE CAN'T SEE THEM

There was a man standing in the screen doorway. Or maybe it was the dirt made it look that way. Anyway, someone was murderously hungry for the wrapped sandwich on the counter. Someone asked if it was dog meat and everyone could smell it. Then forever all meat smelled like dog. At least to the littlest one: a girl of four overhearing everything.

And her aunt was telling about the near-death experience: all white and there were trees cutting through the white and voices up close in her ear like this, of all the ancestors from Kansas and Arizona. All at once. And the aunt held up the dog meat sandwich wrapped and the girl wondered how everything could be white but not the trees and where do they go.

Where do the trees go after life? Or do they just grow. Do trees reach deeper into the ground and higher into the sky and can we tell how old everything is by looking at trees?

Or dust: our hands and the linoleum and everything are made up of smallest pieces like dust, like hairs, smallest pieces moving but we can’t see them. Even the trees are made up of this dust, these tiniest trees.

The screen door slammed on the shadow man. The aunt stepped outside and unwrapped her dinner and no one seemed terrified, least of all the dogs.