The sun pressed down its gauges while the devil went shopping with the leader of the local secret society. They had earlier put the country to bed by pipelining the smells of everyone’s warmest night under a childhood blanket back through vents and attic windows––lifting oppressions, listening for the ice to melt and click in the silence. But there was a human on loan from the deities who hadn’t been knocked out, sitting in the family room wetting his thumbs with yearbooks and photo albums.

Every saint hummed ecstatic, for they too noted some kink in the atavism of that night, reached for their sanguine robes and departed for the new spiritual breath.

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