He still thinks of Celia, but she is a cattercorner, endways Celia now. And why shouldn’t she be? Once he raged and spit on the ground and beat his hands into the dirt as his insides crumbled and splintered to bone in his chest. He moaned like a dog, and far out in the Babylon field at Burning Mountain he hollered his sorrow into the wind that blew everything lost into the black pine woods. At Uniball he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the streaked dirt. Loss become unified grief breathed in the dirt until he was swimming down through the richness of soil and drifting among the big limestone plates and the secret caves of pure water that washed him clean of everything but his humanness. You could lose your mind, lose your soul, lose your day count, but you couldn’t lose that. He had cuts on his forearms from trying to. In Uniball he slashed his own face with the heated edge of a file and the cuts had ridged up so tight his face for a year felt pulled to one side. Somewhere he picked up a limp. He limped into the courtroom for the last trial; the limp hadn’t changed anything.
