the girl has clumps of minced meat, a bag of seeds, and she moves from cage to cage pushing handfuls of these through the bars. she tips her head up, flips her hair away from her eyes and looks at me. hard light here in the clearing. she's what - 40? around that. I see it. it's not a child's figure. I see the muscles on her arms, & through her nightie, the shape of her thighs. it's a dancer’s figure, something like that. her hands are threaded with muscle.

the sables quieten down one by one as they eat but by the time the last is fed the first is growling and huffing again. the father hauls a hose around from the back of the shed and aims it at the animals one by one. they dance against the jet of water, bite at it, whine and leap. shit peels off the cage floors, off their paws and out onto the earth.

through this I stand quietly. I can’t say if he’s seen me or not. I’m waiting for that moment. water runs across the ground from the cages towards me, dead pine needles carried on its surface. it pools round my feet and I feel my shoes turn cold, then the wetness leaks in. when it comes, I think. when it comes I will know what to do. far above, the birds lift the netting by great force of upward beats. their wings close and they drop. he drags the hose away again and disappears.   

help me get them back in the shed, she says. I pick up a pair of cages. the animals thrash. I take them back into the dark, stinking shed. there’s enough light to see the gun is hung up on the wall, suspended on two nails.

what about that? 


no one's ready. we need a buyer for the pelts.


I briefly consider taking it down and smashing it against the side of her head. 


I thought you were younger.


I did used to be.


But not when I held you. why were you there all night? I thought I could do something for you. 


she yelps, then laughs, pulling her hand back from a cage and sucking her finger. I can't see what happened - there's no visible blood and the sable looks unexcited. Listen, we do need an investor, she says. You staying for a drink?


I stay for a drink. The officers are already at the table, drinking. The father - the husband? - is sitting on the pile of clothes she'd left on the floor, working over an account book in the dim light. Turns out the officers know a buyer, someone with a missing kid who is willing to pay more than the pelts are worth.


We can help him, they say, and Klein taps at the death certificate sitting under his glass. It's an okay deal. 


My phone rings. it's mother. She's been left alone all day, can't believe she's been left alone all day. I tell her it's okay, I'm not far away, just over at the summer house, and everything is fine. She reminds me to pick up the rent. It's doubled this last week, she says. Tell them that. It's high time.  

The moon is up when I walk back through the garden. The moon pours light onto the closed eyelids of the trees, and from their eyelids through their fingers and ringing to the ground. The shots begin before I reach the new year citruses, and they come every four or five steps, keeping me in a kind of march till I reach the road and silence falls, still as a kind of ringing, which stays in my ears all the way home.