Eleanor begins a story about a woman, who is her age. And this woman, like Eleanor, has a secret. Unlike Eleanor’s, the woman’s secret is strange. No one would suspect. When this woman closes her eyes, she grows hummingbird wings, iridescent, too green to believe. At the end of this story, the woman will hold her lighter to the wall and wait. But that’s the end, and it isn’t the end yet.

Daddy will you come to
my party when I die?
he said.

the small Southern town that sounds
like hastening. Where even now your rows
of cabbage and potatoes lie beneath
the soil, parched from the eye of the sun.