No. 1
LATE SUMMER.
The grounds don't change much this time of year. The line is shorter after harvest starts, which surprises people, and shouldn't: the carrying gets heavier when the days get long, not lighter.
From the drawer. A card for two sisters who called a kitchen. Neither of them has ever told me which one wrote the sentence and which one held the pencil, and they have had nine years to. The kitchen is open. They still argue about the salt.
The paper. Reproduced this issue: a corner of the Baton Rouge customs sheet, the one the fire went around. You can still read the clerk's hand where he wrote excepted peril and, below it, fainter, a second note he never finished: contents appear to be. Appear to be what, he doesn't say. He retired that year. I understand him completely. I know about notes a man doesn't finish. Mine's finished. It has been finished in this pocket longer than that clerk kept his job.
Said at the gate this season. A woman, stopping at Station Three of her own walk, told me: "I'm not ready, and I'm done pretending that's the same as never." I wrote it on a card and put it in the drawer with the successes. She hasn't been back. The card's still in that drawer and I'm not moving it.
Notice. The questions are taking walkers again. Eight of them, plain ones, the kind a bright twelve-year-old would ask you at dinner. Booth one is free; it always has been.
The questions know you're coming.
Set at the midway.