Home from work, one in the morning. There is a sweep of stars in the sky. And even though I forgot my sweat shirt, there is not one shudder of cold struggling up out of the car to open the gate. Of course the air shifts and moves, it dallies and splays across me, but only cool. Park at the house, I walk past the window where Tony sleeps. He will not hear me. He never hears me. Half deaf and on his way to sevety. The dogs hold steady inside. Gravel crunches as I walk past the white pickup dwarfed under the white camper. My brother will have his hearing aides out but he will hear me. My family sleeps light and he wrestles with the ghost of his recently dead wife. That portal is still open for him with tentacles passing back and forth like the flow of seaweed.
The barn is lit up. I can see the cat from here. She moves like a squat shadow against the ground. Drop and roll. I let myself in through the empty stall and Little-Miss-Rue, girl kitty, meets me at the door, escorts me to the tack room. The goats are silent. Three does and two males. I let myself out the outside tack room door to find my pee bucket and then I am done for this night. Little-Miss-Rue watches as I pull myself up the loft bed ladder and then she leaves by way of the cat door. We are three aging humans, the men like two solitary bulls and the one old woman clustered with the other animals in the barn. Sleep springs over me in my high up bed.
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