Rumble, young man.

Walking around, I was thinking about this story I know. It is of this one, where a lone apple tree grew just off the edge of his property. The boy never knew it was an apple tree, though, not for a long time because it looked like any sort of small tree--until it suddenly grew a single piece of fruit late one summer. He saw it for its new seeds, and saw the future beauty of stretching, unordered fields. But with this first bearing, all he could think of was to give it to the girl. So he picked it, and she liked it very much, loved it in fact, particularly its fresh crunch because it had no bruises. She told him that she detested bruises. And she was apologetically dissatisfied about there being only one apple. Perhaps if they encouraged the tree, they thought, and talked to it, then it might bloom a few more blossoms. They stood together and he stared at the tree into the deep night, stared so hard that he did not realize the early morning sun arriving. He blinked into its brightening, and looked around to see that the girl had slipped off in the dark. He saw the path she made through the pressed, dewy grass. She had left.

But when he looked up into the morning he saw a tree standing heavy with bright fruit. He gathered a bushel of them, all of them he could find, for her. They were her apples. He followed her path, through forests and then fields and then mountains, and he brought them to her. He reached her at last, maybe because he should have or maybe because she let him. But somehow, by the time he brought them to her they were no good. Not only had they been jostled as he travelled, but one old rotter that had been forgotten to be chucked out was stinking in the bottom of her basket. He didn't see it when he packed, and didn't think it existed among so many new ones. It did, and she found it, and then found all the others rotten and bruised as well. He tried to show her two apples that were still good to share, but she wanted neither and turned. Detracted and embarrassed, he left too, was made to leave before he could show her that not every apple was ruined. All of them in the bushel were tumbled and scattered across the hard ground--but alone now and standing in the sun, he reached inside his collar. He had still kept one safe in his coat, for just in case.

But a chipped fragment.

"Your name is Rocky?" I said. He said, "That's what I said, yes." I smirked a bit, I think--probably something that appeared too shocking--and said, "That's funny. You know, I just met a raccoon yesterday." He didn't blink once, and asked, "What does that matter to me? What's funny about it?" Nevermind, I thought. I had no proper approach. I met this fellow the next day here, because it is the nature of the world to bring its own striking brand of twisted humour to one's feet, but only just as one begins to become confident of a kind of security. "So, do you need me to put you on the side of the road then?" This time he did blink. "Now, why would I need you to do that? Does it look like I want you to put me on the side of the road?" "Well, I just thought it might be a better way to deal with cars or trucks." His toes were long, sharp nails, like his beak. Every part of him looked harder with each moment. Even his tail looked sharp now. "I suppose it looks more like you could use a lift, since you're not even directed towards either ditch. Where are you headed?" But it was too late, and he didn't seem to be paying attention to me anymore.

Consonance / Vigilius.

"Barnaby?" I repeated after him. "That doesn't really sound like much of a name for a raccoon." He didn't look it, at least. This one was out on the road, on his own under the sun. He stared high up at me and murmured.

I thought about this video I had seen, of some man on a motorcycle stopping to carry a two-toed sloth that was crossing, and crossing, the road somewhere in Costa Rica. He took hold of its shoulders and when the sloth was lifted from the ground, all of its four legs stuck out straight and stiff until it was set back down again, safe on the other side.

This one came towards me now when I approached, surprising me. I had to scoop it up under its warm belly. But its fur was not soft as it looked, and its sharp toes tried to push off my light grasp. At first I put it back on the side of the road it seemed to have come from, but in the tall, thick grass of the ditch that must have offered no orientation. So I placed it further out, at the edge of the forest for distinction.

Once I returned home I told my father about it, and he recommended I had not touched it. They are night time animals, and to see them out in the open like that during the day could very well mean it has rabies. Looking down at the remote control I held in my hand, my mother furrowed and said, "I sure hope you washed your hands."

Birds is falling.

I was telling the ones in my kitchen about the sign. In the heat of August (though perhaps in June while standing on a dock, or perhaps in a December long before while throwing snowballs at a stranger's--who was to become a future Regis--window) something that had bounced within me all along began to stumble forth from me but was still frothing at corners like a flow getting caught in a stream--now it stands tall and light, beaming a gold tint upon everything that is. "The glory," like what Steinbeck writes about. As soon as it became able to speak it was silenced, however, until I determined that it couldn't, that it should not.

Anyway, that isn't even what I was talking about in the kitchen. I was talking about that new determination and I was telling about the sign. It came to me while I was out on a walk with our boy late at night. I was thinking aloud to the trees and to the stars and their sky. They have become the runners-up in conversation since I still walk here, because I like to think of their shared importance, and of the idea that, when you think about it, they are all sharing with you and I our same whistling air.

I was thinking through this light, wondering to the snow on the toes of my boots whether I ought now to shield it. I looked up and asked the trees, too, who had been solemnly listening with that stillness they carry.

Two people were talking together about the dances they have shared. He said that he missed it, he missed dancing with her, perhaps veiling the deeper, more obvious thought that dancing with her held a highest inclusion among his happiest patches of moments. Yet, "I love dancing with you," he said. Those blurry, whirring moments of scuffing feet and squeezing hands, and how could you do anything else but smile at how sparkling it all is. That is how he always thought of them, as moments that he had always wanted to start and never wanted to end, and he felt a fuse cut short by the way that she recalled all of those dances, pointing to him with biting expression, "I always had to drag and force you to start because you never wanted to."

How reasonable would he have sounded though, I could not help but think, if he had mentioned that the greatness of those moments, sharing a dance, bore little comparison to the small beginnings in hesitancy that were due only to a few foreign voices shouting through his head. But those opening seconds of nervousness, of crossing fingers to catch a rhythm, had been there, even if only for seconds, and so by existing would be available to carry a greater emphasis than the loud and glimmering dance.

Past memories can be manipulated to suit. What I was telling in my kitchen, though, was that I had lost my keys. There were inches of new snow stretching across that long park, and every criss and cross my steps took felt like it was impossible. I could make no new landmarks for places I had not looked. But after long hours of looking, when I had decided to give up and walk back home I followed a thought that struck me and checked my car door. It was unlocked, and my keys were sitting on the passenger seat.

Then the very next night my car had been broken into, the small change and adapters and gadgets gone, but only then my keys were no longer on the passenger seat.