After late dinner we took a walk. Us three. Husband in his T-shirt and pajama pants and new white athletic shoes, brotherB in his faded jeans and "Alturas" hoodie and heavy black leather shoes, me in my enormous green rayon fat-lady dress and bungie sandals. We walked the warm dark streets under the waxing gibbous moon. "Mooh," said Brian, pointing. Then "Boah" when we passed a fishing boat parked in a driveway. We walked fast, Husband and I fondling each others' fingers and palms, B falling behind and then moving ahead, wandering into our trajectory and then angling away. We cut across the high school athletic field where a pair of young people sat talking quietly in the grassy edgeshadows, drinking beer. When we reached the street beyond we turned west and made our way in the dark toward the cemetery on the top of a rise at the town's edge. It's fairly wild there. Maybe we would spot a coyote or a bear or an owl. After a while we reached the graveyard and opened the gate and walked a circuit, wary for vampires. On the pavement again I pressed on past the cemetery, drawn by a great hissss-ing, to where enormous robotic sprinklers crawled across a field disgorging water in a fine torrent that made a dim rectangular fog on the darkened landscape. A young couple walked past us there, dark forms leaning into one another in the moonlight, oblivious. I stood for a while with Husband and brotherB and wondered at the vast mechanical irrigators. These acres across from the graveyard were the dead empty area annexed for expansion, no? They were forcing water onto it all the dark warm night using unpeopled machinery, bringing the dead ground to life in order one day to bury their dead there. Perhaps. I shuddered. We turned then and headed home. A little chill was settling, finally. "Bahr," said B, pointing to a distant outbuilding. As we walked, moonlight on the broken glass along the roadshoulder sparkled like stars, but only if we kept moving. We never saw any wild animals.

***

Today I opened a random book at random. I stumbled randomly, then, on the perfect expression of the way I have been feeling for a long time.

The Other

I killed someone
inside of me.
I didn't love her.

She was a fiery flower
of the mountain cactus;
she was thirst and flames,
never stopping for refreshment.

She traveled a rocky way,
and pressed her shoulders against the sky;
she never descended
to search for the eyes of water.

The grass withered
where she rested,
burned by her breath
and face of incandescent coals.

With rapid resins,
her speech hardened
never to be set free
in a glorious cascade.

This mountain flower
did not know how to bend -
but by her side,
I bent.

I allowed her to die,
robbing her of my heart.
She perished like an eagle
left to starve.

The thunder in her wings
became silent;
she fell and withered
in my hands,
final embers ...

Her sisters still cry out
to me for her sake,
and a clay fire
claws me in passage.

As I travel,
I tell them:
Look through the ruins
and with the clay create
another eagle with wings of fire.

If you cannot, then,
oh! Forget her.
I killed her.
You must kill her too!

(Gabriela Mistral, trans. Maria Giachetti)

I could not have said it a fraction as well.