He went out into the barn’s slanty light. He contemplated the shotgun. Sat holding the check and feeling its physicality, thinking, the check will hold me.  It has to. 

Wanting only to go to town, watch the young girls with their tangerine breasts with sunflower seed nipples and waves and waves of hair, fill himself up on that and call it lunch.

She watches from the window, the silence of the children loud behind her, the ring on her finger tightening as if in warning.   It falls to her to explain him in all his bent consciousness.  An explanation that will make her a liar in the cubist tradition, presenting a different angle on their particular truth

 Outside where the car used to be there is a canoe, hollowed from a tree by his own hands.  It is guarded by a dog, its brown eyes deep with mystery. 

She breathes deeply, the air in her chest like energy or god or life itself, and turns to face them.