Larry Watson

When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences _ and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what__ no longer there.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one__ breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won__ warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.