The boys say there’s a group of coyotes getting bold in the fields near Walmart, but those coward animals and never come full into town. Still, what’s the harm in getting a hunt together, they ask. 

Main Street runs through the center of the cemetery in my town.

* * *

The morning light and the way it falls in dappled columns might be beautiful, but we walk into windowless buildings all the same. Many days I realize my dreams are fiction half way through.

I break tea cups and sneak candy from office jars.

The cicada shells litter sidewalks and crunch like ice.

I cry while I hang the laundry and appreciate that the breeze is still warm enough for this. Everything flaps for a moment in the wind.

At Walmart there were hundreds of mustards on clearance.

So many condiments will survive the end of the world. 

* * *

We are promised storms that never come. Clouds and clouds pile in on themselves and lose all of their gumption, settling down to create a starless night.

Scientifically, there is no such thing as heat lightning.

Still, every night it flashes through this thick velvet air.

* * *

This night is exactly like last night. It goes like this, this slow cooling, until one evening you’re setting tomorrow's coffee and notice all of it has changed.

Goodbye to football fields, to bug bodies, to bits of butterfly wings!

The football players will play through the sleet. The foxes will still find their prey.

Let the slowing of decay begin.