I want to talk about Hannah Lee's death, about my best friend Hannah Lee Evers' dying. I just don't know what to say or how to say it. Would you bear with me? It was just yesterday that she was buried. They did an autopsy--they had to--but nobody knows yet what they found out. Maybe hypothermia, maybe head trauma, or maybe just drowning in two or three inches of water.

They decided, thank God, that it wasn't murder. Hannah Lee's folks never liked Davey anyway, not for any particular reason--his haircut, his middle name, who knows what--but I heard there was one queasy moment when someone said two words--foul play --and the whole world seemed tainted, no respite at all anywhere, no safe place, no covey or rock overhang shadowed from evil. But they got over that fear of foul play business quickly. They had to blame someone, I guess, because it would be neater. Poor Davey. Poor Elsabeth, poor sweet Olivia, poor little T.J. I can't talk this way. This is maudlin and sick. But what else can you say? Words go limp or go stiff and smell rank and make no sense at all. But bear with me.

They had just been out hiking, the two of them, Davey and Hannah Lee. Up by Twin Sisters, with perfect snow, not too much of it, but crisp white, and the weather as blue as it seemed possible to be. Back home the two little girls and their toddler brother would be watching a new video--The Land BeforeTime--over and over. Their babysitter, who made oatmeal cookies the size of cow patties--Hannah Lee laughed about this--would be making great batches of batter and listening to Abbey Road again and again, on the headphones that disappeared in the great rusty-brillo mass of her hair. In the video, the mother dinosaur would die, and the girls would cry, and replay it, and cry, and replay it. They had seen Bambi's mother die, too. It was one of their favorite scenes.

And meanwhile Davey and Hannah Lee had all of their gear in the car, heading south, thinking maybe that they would... what DO people do when they have children and they are getting away? Is there some kind of impulse to run and keep running? I wouldn't know. Must be a feeling of something like that, even if you have sweet children like theirs. Must be something like, sweet Jesus, what are we doing with all of these anchors to earth, and how can I even be saying this? I have no "anchors," no heirs (even if there were anything but my Isuzu to pass on, with two years of notes left to pay) and yet here I am, feet on the planet, and Hannah Lee's off to heaven if that's where she's gone and it makes my skin crawl because here I am wanting to really believe that. I feel myself peering up into the cumulo-nimbus clouds sweeping the sky today, looking for Hannah Lee, ready to wave goodbye as I did when she took off on Semester at Sea a full dozen years ago and I stayed home.

I hope at least that she and Davey did not just fall asleep, the night before, like I guess old married people, if that is what old married people do. I hope they fucked their eyes out, like a couple of ravenous good Christian tigers, defying death, in those old plaid sleeping bags. I hear you don't get that good juicy stuff on the Other Side. At the funeral, I thought of this: there was Davey, looking rather as if he had half-forgotten something and was trying to bring it back, looking as if he had half a head-cold, half a migraine, and all I could think was did Hannah Lee go out loved up and smelling like it? The flesh has its advantages. This is not something we talk about at anyone's wake. But don't you think some of us think it? We're wanting to hold on to what we have, or have it more. That's mortality for you, casting its shadow back over the beds of the mourners, a shadow that's actually a warm light, a glow, something like love, get it while it's hot.

Once in high school Hannah Lee and I were in the bio-chem lab. We had just had lunch. I remember the scene with my senses rather than with my mind: the smell of dill pickles half-eaten, brought in from lunch, and all the dill-pickle inspired dick jokes; the smell of formaldehyde; the latex feel of the brown-green-pink frogs laid out pinned to the wax in their dissecting trays.

There was a boy in the class, Richard something, because that was a name people still named their kids, and of course everybody was chanting Dick this and Dick that, with the dick jokes. The teacher was senile and basically blind, a poor creature who had been teaching there for hundreds of years. She was smiling, oblivious to all of this. Why is everyone calling for Dick? she said. Are congratulations in order? Did Dick score a touchdown? Oh, yes, Mrs. Plasters, we chanted in unison. Dick scored a touchdown. He was second-string on the basketball team. Oh, Richard, very fine!! said Mrs. Plasters with gusto. Now take out your frogs.

While we scored the rubbery fronts of the frogs with our sweet little lab scalpels--the air filled with exclamations, oh putrid, oh gross --my lab partner started playing with the valve on the Bunsen burner, listening to the hiss of the gas. Smell this , he said, leaning over toward me. It took only a split second for it to happen, all of it. The boy behind him, who always had a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled in the sleeve of his t-shirt, as if James Dean who did that same thing were not long dead, leaned forward with a match, and the girl in front of him, who had hair as big as the hair Hannah Lee's babysitter the very last night of her life would have, leaned back to smell it and there went the flame and there went her hair, such a strange sight or even a foreign idea, as if hair were holy and could not burn, for all of that, and the sight of the flames was astonishing, and there we stood watching her on fire, with her mouth open, unable to scream, just a matter of seconds, and all of us standing there stupidly, oh, very stupidly.

Finally the James Dean boy with the match pulled his sweater off over his head and jumped onto her with it, wrapped it over the fire like a turban. I could smell his sweat, pickle-like. I imagine the girl on fire could smell it quite a bit more. He just cradled her there, sort of crouching. His eyes looked odd, puzzled, as if he did not know what he should do now, whether, if he let go, she would flame up again.

Old Mrs. Plasters had not seen a thing except that there was ruckus. You calm down back there! she was piping. There'll be other touchdowns! And even though Evelyn Pye--the girl who had been on fire--had come out of her shock and was screaming now, wrapped in her turban and James Dean's b.o., no one could hear for the laughter.

In the mountains there is such a sense of that closeness to what it is all about that Hannah Lee loved to talk about. From the lowlands, when I am out driving, I can see the snowcaps, and sometimes I think I arrange to be out driving just at the time that the rays from off Puget Sound strike the snow gold, and something in me wants to shout alleluia, despite all my heathenness. Last year Hannah Lee insisted I come to her church to see a film she said would show fragments of Noah's Ark lodged in the side of a mountain in Turkey. I said what was the difference. She said it might bring it home to me that some of this stuff was real history, not just old fairy tales. Give me a break, I said.

Really, she said, wouldn't it make things different for you if all of that really were true? Wouldn't it make you happier? If the world had been destroyed by a flood, I said, that would make me happier? No, she said, if it had gone through that and been saved. If such a disaster had been survived. All I could do was to sigh. Hannah Lee has been wanting to save me since high school. Once I said, angry, and what is this heaven like that you will get to go to? Anything you want, Hannah Lee said. Past our minds, so just try to imagine it and anything you imagine is nowhere near it but imagine it anyway. I said: skating rinks? cling peaches twice as good as those we got from the roadside stand outside Port Townsend? music like Scarlatti or Saint-Saens? She said: anything, everything.

In the film they didn't actually show what she had said she thought they'd show. They showed drawings of what people said they had seen. They showed people cruising in biplanes but not finding anything. But you know how they do: if they say it in just the right tone while the biplane is cruising you get the sense that in this particular showing they might find the ark.

The mountain they showed--which was Ararat, everyone has heard of Ararat--looked a lot like the mountain near here where a man fell off recently, just fell off. This struck me rather odd, somehow. Mountains would seem to have a peculiarly strong sort of gravity, somehow. Doesn't it seem? Maybe I'm thinking not quite straight, thinking that nature is here to support us, and not red in tooth and claw. Thinking something like that despite all that I know, thinking as if all evil were human, intentional, self-centered. Thinking that thing despite tornadoes, disease, and flood.

In the past year three friends of mine have come near dying: one in a tornado, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I excused that because everyone knows that in someplace as savage as Mississippi you might expect that; one had her breast lopped off--thirty-three years old!--and one, in Missouri, had her whole house washed away, into the river, until it caught under a railroad bridge, floating like an ark, watertight enough to save her whole set of encyclopedias, and her cat, who was tucked in his favorite chair when they finally got the house free. But they all three survived these strange terrible things.

But then Hannah Lee died. They had been hiking, cross-country skiing to be precise. It was the kind of snow we have not seen in the lowlands this year at all: perfect for cross-country, and those advertisement-blue skies. I imagine that Hannah Lee was in one of her praise-the-Lord moods. She got that way when nature was kind. Though she also got that way when nature was cruel or people were cruel. It was always, praise the Lord. There was always some seed of beneficence in the worst tragedy.

On the best of days, Hannah Lee hydroplaned in and on ecstasy, rode on a cushion of air so gold it shimmered blue, evidence that the universe was somehow conspiring to make her happy. Her children's eyes were evidence of that for her, or the shape of the roof of a birdhouse that Davey had built for their backyard, or the surprise gift of three dozen still-warm pale-brown eggs from her neighbor's henhouse. A thunderstorm was that evidence, even if in the slick dark someone crashed on the county road; dawn was that evidence, even if she had not gotten her sleep because T.J. had colic; a slice of moon over the trees was that evidence, even if it hung over a town where there had been two child-molestations last month--she would call me from a phone booth beside the Safeway to insist that I look out and see it before it changed. Then, yesterday, she was buried, having fallen face-down in a stream as deep as the soup tureen that I had given her at her wedding shower. Her head hit a stone flat and round and benign as a loaf of sourdough bread.

She and Davey had actually cooked a breakfast, an hour before. A grand production: a fire in the snow, and coffee in the blue-speckled pot, and eggs (from the neighbor) fried soft. Hannah Lee knew how to do that. I had been out camping with them, up on Vancouver Island, a couple of years ago, and I was amazed at the way Hannah Lee seemed able to make the wild island seem as hospitable as her own kitchen, not even frazzling the eggs. They had eaten, and cleaned up, and hiked out a couple of miles toward the road with their packs. But then Hannah Lee started to falter. She said she was cold. She felt weak. Davey didn't know what to make of it. Why am I telling you this way? I'll tell you as Davey told me, in his words.

It was so strange, he said. You know Hannah Lee, tough as a trouper. Not ever a grumble. But there she is saying, oh, Davey, I feel just so... not myself. She was walking so slowly, seemed so, sort of spacey. She started quoting from the psalms, sort of ragged and patchwork. You've got to rest, I said. You've got to sit down. She protested. No, no, I'm fine. As if something depended on her perseverance, and nothing did. I just finally took her pack. I said, I am not fooling, Hannah Lee, you just sit down. On that rock. I'll hike out to the road with the packs.

As he was telling this, I could see the features of his face moving around as if his face were a whirlpool of sorts, and something in the middle was swirling and ready to disappear into the vortex, and of course that was Hannah Lee. As if telling the thing again would bring her back again, then make her vanish. As if, when he told once more, for the fortieth time, he could stop at a point where she was still alive and freeze-frame the whole thing his way: Hannah Lee back on earth, just sitting on that rock, staying there, for godsake, Hannah Lee, stay there.

Which is just what she did not do. Davey took her pack--I can just see it, purple, with the little silver wings she got on an airplane one time pinned to it, I remember it from walking behind her when we were hiking Vancouver Island--and his own, whose color I don't remember, and why should I, and he hiked out to the road, a mile and some. A mile and a quarter, he said. Some tree, some open ground, a rise, a ravine. I'm not sure how he figured that mile and a quarter. (I hiked it myself the day after her death--I drove down there to look at the ground and the stream and the rock and see if I could find any meaning or redemption or explanation. You guessed it: I couldn't.) Then he hiked on back in.

But Hannah Lee had gotten up and started walking. There was a stream not fifty feet from the place where he sat her down. She had slipped, or just fallen, and there she was, face-down in water not three inches deep, and not breathing. She had hit her head on a rock. There was just a small bit of blood on her forehead when he lifted her out of the stream, and I suppose the stream had been washing it clean as she lay there. She was indisputably dead.

I do not know for certain what happened then. Davey did not tell us. We know he can be very composed--this is Davey's reputation, great composure--but I cannot imagine anything other than Davey yowling his grief to the skies, holding Hannah Lee Pieta-like in his arms, and the skies deaf and perfectly blue, and the rocks just as deaf, and the caps of the mountains to the east of them dazzling morning-white and imperturbable, and the dense green firs shading the stream, and the snazzy flash of an occasional bite-through of sun in the evergreen canopy, and Hannah Lee dead in his arms and the world going on. Back at home the girls were watching Saturday morning cartoons. I was in my Isuzu, going through the carwash, with my Saturday morning latte', thinking that my life was okay, wasn't it? wasn't it? even if I was as lonely as that and wanting anesthesia. And Davey stood there holding Hannah Lee, limp and damp and not breathing, and none of us knowing.

I visited my friend Doreen in Iowa last year. The one who survived the flood. She had this attitude: all of the things that she valued that had just been swept away, none of them mattered except the footlocker with all her family photos. And then, she said, after all, what did THEY matter, they were just memory-cues, and the memories were all still there, so she felt that the flood had freed her. She rejoiced in the flood.

She was living in the world's smallest apartment. She had been such a city girl before. Now, all of a sudden, she went outdoors every night, even in winter, and sat listening to the bugs and the raccoons and birds whose names she had no notion of, respecting all of it, thankful for it. I found her attitude more than peculiar. It was as if she had another version of this "praise-the-Lord" weirdness Hannah Lee had.

My friend took me to a dry creek-bed where all of the soil had been swept away by the flood. Underneath it all, ten feet down, white as an aisle runner at someone's wedding, there was a carpet, a ribbon that ran the length of the creek-bed. It was limestone, embedded with fossils--tiny fish, round things like sand-dollars, trilobites, who knew what--like a designer's random-seeming but extremely ordered pattern.

A small dam had burst, and the water had come flooding through this short narrow sluice which served as a spillway to the river, taking with it a ribbon of mucky clay ten or a dozen feet thick. Beneath the black soil that was just swept away was this mute white astonishment, so new it had not had time to be anything but stark white, starting to be dusted with dust from curious hikers' boots. It was a record of life and destruction-of-life. I walked the breadth of that white sheet of bone-sprinkled stone in amazement. I told Hannah Lee when I came home.

It probably was Noah's flood, she said, that left those fossils. It would have made sense. There it comes, covering everything, drastic change, all of a sudden, extinction of species, but everything worth keeping getting preserved. She said it all straightfaced.That flood did cover everything.

My mouth must have been hanging open. She laughed at me. Oh me of little faith. She was perfectly serious. Here, help me with this. She was knitting a silky blue scarf for Davey, so soft that it clung where it touched anything like pure water. She asked me to hold out my hands so she could wind the yarn. It was a distraction from my dismay at her simple faith. She did not want me to say anything more about Noah.

I looked out the window at the afternoon. It was midsummer, and it was a perfect blue day. But my thoughts roiled and ruckussed and my eyes shifted to a table nearby where a fresh magazine lay, untouched, unread. It had the strangest name: Wooden Boat magazine. I knew Davey was building a boat, which was perfectly fine, human, reasonable, a good hobby thing, better than husbands who liked to go boozing. It was just too close to all these fossils and Hannah Lee's mention of Noah.

I thought of the boat up on Ararat finally giving itself over to simple gravity, and falling, down, down, falling onto the plain
--in my mind this occurred in slow motion--where Turkish sheepherders in striped tunics--or do they wear basketball-team logo jerseys now, bought for a pricey sum by international traders?--no doubt scratching their heads in amazement--would find it intact. I thought: somebody probably needs an ark, Davey, go build your boat, go on ahead. Maybe take us all on a cruise, along with two horses, two camels, two everything, except that I myself am one-by-one, when the deluge comes.

I remember, oh, much farther back, when Hannah Lee and I were in second grade, coming home from school. There was a park with a bandstand on our route. I had never heard any band play there, and that was in a time when those old things, nostalgia things, bandstands and heritage festivals, had not come back yet. The world was still wanting modernity.

Hannah Lee and I would stop there giggling and go back behind the bandstand and pee. I would stand guard for her and she for me. It was such a rascally thing for the two of us: neither of us had ever done anything so daring, and I think since that time Hannah Lee never did ever again, though I have had my moments of risk. I remember the thrill of the sound of her pee hitting soft secret grass, our complicity in that small crime.

I recall that May in junior high, when the trees were in beautiful cherry-pink-and-pale-green bud, when we both got our first periods in the same month. Do you think we are really twins, split at birth? I said. I wanted to be Hannah Lee's perfect twin, and she wanted to be mine, though perhaps she longed for that rather less earnestly, if I were to be honest, because she seemed to have, from the get-go, more of a sense of her wholeness than I did.

I remember when Hannah Lee gave birth to T.J. at home, in the middle of the night, and I was the only one there, me, the totally inexperienced one, hardly an ideal candidate to assist. It was a month early, and the baby was coming too quickly to get her to the hospital, and Davey was out of town on business and we couldn't get hold of him.

I remember the blood in the bed, and my fear that she would not stop bleeding, and more blood, and more blood, the spray of it striking the ceiling, and me trying to keep her calm even though I was thoroughly panicked inside, but then there came the medics and as if on cue Hannah Lee's bleeding stopped, without their help, and they took her off to St. Joe's, lights twirling and sirens whining to let the town know they were heroes.

I stayed there to clean up the blood from the ceiling while they took her off to the hospital, smiling and nuzzling her baby close. "It's LIFE blood!" she kept saying. "It's GOOD blood!" She seemed to be proud of it.

At that moment, while they carted her away, loony with happiness, I needed the time to collect myself. I had never seen anything like this, done anything like this, before. So I stayed behind at the house.

I could hardly reach the ceiling. I stood on the bed and stretched high and the mattress gave way underneath me and I fell twice and started to laugh but wound up crying, not knowing what for, maybe from relief, maybe from the sheer drama of it and my own uselessness, swabbed at it with Davey's old toothbrush, and in a half hour I had it clean.

That same week our friend Carrie had to have an emergency hysterectomy so that she would not bleed to death. This had been going on--these wild bleeds of hers--for a few months, but this last one was way past what anyone could have survived. We speculated whether there was some tidal force operating in the cosmos, whether we would all be swept away on the flood of it.

Not two weeks ago, early in the morning, I was out getting my Saturday latte', the ritual: a stop at the newsstand, a coffee, a carwash, a trip to the co-op. After my latte'--I am as routinized in this as an old librarian--I pay the teenaged attendant for the top-of-the-line Diamond Wash, superstitiously somehow thinking it makes my Isuzu immortal, and me by extension; I hum with Saturday-carwash joy as my car, firmly fixed in Neutral, is carried on arms of grace through all the sloshy blue tentacles, through the cataract. There is nothing I love better than this ride, the held-captive-and-sloshed-within-an-inch-of-my-life thrill. I watch the soap drool down the glass, and I love it; I watch the rinsewater and then the mysterious drying solution, the hot air, the sprayed milky wax. I watch the guy in the
UW ballcap rub down my hood in a way that is so tender it's almost erotic.

That particular day, I wound up staying and drinking the coffee there, at the coffee shop with all the glossy espresso gear everywhere, all of the chic fat clay cups, and fresh flowers, and posters of Africa where all the coffees came from, instead of rushing off as I usually do. A guy with a beard, maybe five years older than me, came and sat near me. He looked like a geologist, or an author. He started to flirt. He was drinking his coffee black, in his own cup that he had brought in. The cup had another store's logo on it.

I thought: I wonder what Noah looked like. How long his beard was. And how he smelled: of gopherwood shavings? of all the manure of the animals, two by two, shitting their way to salvation? I sniffed slightly, though I tried not to. The man did not smell like anything I could discern. And instead of being satisfied with that, I sniffed again. I decided that perhaps he smelled of wood, or perhaps not.

I looked up from the newspaper, an account of more mayhem in the Balkans, a story about an adoption in which two couples were fighting over a child that a Lakota Sioux tribe said that neither of them should be getting because they were Caucasians, a piece detailing projections about who would win Best Actress at the Oscars, and Best Special Effects.

I thought: this geologist/author guy looks kind of hard about the eyes. I thought: oh, shit, maybe I do, too, and I am doubtless narrowing my own eyes as I sit here scoping him out. I thought: I wish Hannah Lee were here to tell me whether to trust him at all. I thought: there she is, living a life I keep calling so narrow, and here I am, living not so very much of a life at all, with the cleanest Isuzu in all of my zipcode, and the cleanest sheets.

I did not think: in two weeks my very best friend in the world will be dead at the age of thirty-four years and eleven months, because I did not know that. I did not think: the surprise birthday party I'm hatching will never come off, because I could never have guessed. I did not think: in two weeks, sweet Hannah Lee, deep in the earth.

I looked back at the paper, at a travel-section photograph taken from the top of a ski-jump at Lillehammer, Norway. I thought: I take no risks at all, these days. I looked back at the eyes of the man. He was talking about a house up in Victoria he was restoring. I looked at his hands to see whether they were rough or smooth and, before I could even decide, looked away again.

I looked at his eyes again and thought yes, they were hard and my life was quite safe, thank you, and my Isuzu was waiting to go through the sloshes and geysers and hand-chamois-buffing of the baseball-hatted attendant. I folded my newspaper neatly, decisively, without saying a thing. I smiled politely to counter my muteness and walked out the door.

When they told Hannah Lee's girls she had died, it was awful. They couldn't comprehend it. Elsabeth is old enough, and, really, so is Olivia, but they had never known anyone to die. "Not MY mommy!" Olivia said. "MY mommy is coming home! MY mommy always comes home!"

Then the tears started, and the keening, and the babysitter started running around saying "Let's make some gingerbread, girls! Make some gingerbread girls!"

"For when Mommy comes home!" said Olivia.

Elsabeth ran to the bathroom, in a frenzy, wild with her grief, and got into the bathtub still wearing her clothes, her sweater, her corduroys. She turned on the water full force--what, for the noise of it?--and started screaming, sticking her fingers deep in her ears, shutting it all out.

Davey was still at the hospital. I don't know why they had to tell them that way, or then. But what way is good? What time is good? Either to die, or to tell anybody about it.

Once a man said that he wanted to drown in my eyes. Hannah Lee said that was great, that Davey had never said anything like that, but she loved him anyway. Once another
man--he was rather earthier--said something a bit more explicit whose general import was that I comprised all the oceans of the earth, and he wanted to swim in those oceans, that I was the source of all life and so forth. The next day it seemed silly. It had worked, for the moment, the night before. I had not dated anyone in a long time. It all seemed far too overwhelming, the whole possibility of falling--as into a terrible river, with all the debris of a thousand displaced families, their sofas floating, their scottie dogs, their address books--of falling into love.

At the funeral, little T.J. clung to Davey moaning something over and over again. I leaned over and asked Elsabeth what he was saying.

"He's saying No Sharptooth ," she answered, as if I would understand.

I looked my incomprehension at her.

"In The Land Before Time," Elsabeth said, as if I were thick or forgetful. "Sharptooth is the dinosaur who kills the mommy. He bites out her neck."

I said I had not seen the movie.

After the funeral, I occupied myself trying to keep the children out of the way. It was the best thing I could think of to keep myself busy. I wanted to break all the windows, to pull rocks--like the rock where Hannah Lee had hit her forehead--out of the carpeted floor and hurl them at the panes, I wanted to tear my own throat open with my fingernails.

I wanted to fly across all of the mountains and prairies to Doreen's little town on the Iowa River and rip the dam apart, sending all that water sluicing over the fossil bed, covering death, reasserting the force of life. But I could not. I knew the choked impotence of grief, the grief that long years ago made rending-of-garments a ritual motion, so that mourners would have a way to do what they would do anyway, and have it look sane. But we cannot do this today. We are modern.

So instead I picked up a book and carried T.J. upstairs on my hip, while the voices downstairs in the family room kept up a murmur. The girls followed me. I was the closest thing they had to something resembling an auntie.

T.J.burrowed his head into my neck. "No Sharptooth bite Mommy," he protested.

Olivia started a high-pitched keen.

"Can it," said Elsabeth, curt and imperious.

I read a tale called "The Old Woman and Her Pig." The old woman has bought a pig at the market and is trying to get it home, but she cannot. The pig won't get over the stile, so she asks the assistance of a dog, who as you can guess will not help.

She says, "Dog, dog, bite pig;
Piggy won't get over the stile,
And I shan't get home tonight!"

The stick won't beat the dog, the fire won't burn the stick, and so on. No one and nothing will cooperate. When I got to the woman insisting that the water should quench the fire, T.J. was just picking up on the verse before.

"No fire burn stick!" he began chanting.

I read: "Water, water, quench fire;
Fire won't burn stick,
Stick won't beat dog;
Dog won't bite pig;
Piggy won't get over the stile, and I shan't get home tonight."

It was perfect. I could not make anything do anything, either. Death was more stubborn than life, and the more you tied into life--loving more people, begetting and taking on mortgages and magazine subscriptions and collecting camping gear--the worse it made it, when you were born into something else, a life where you flew around like a gas escaping in Mrs. Plasters' lab. People just had to cancel your magazines and figure out what to do with your trophies from high school. I decided I had made the right decision not to talk to Noah back at the coffee shop, house in Victoria and lovely beard notwithstanding.

But finally, in the story, the little old lady got home, as did her naughty pig. Various horrible things had to happen to make this work: a butcher was killing an ox, a rope eas hanging a butcher, and so on. The dog did his job, nipped the pig, the pig leapt the stile.

I myself, like the old lady, got home last night. I put the children to sleep and I left. I did not talk to Davey. I just had no words.

I dreamed this dream: there is a woman, she is underwater, her hair is not Hannah Lee's, not mine, not the babysitter's, not Evelyn Pye's, but her hair is on fire. Her hair is a vibrant copper-bronze-gold color, burling every which way like seaweed, and it is on fire, underwater. Her eyes are wide open, and she looks straight at us, the dreamers. The dream-lens zooms back, and we are seeing all of this from overhead: we can see the woman beneath the bright reflective green clear surface of the water, and we know she is you, she is me.

On the land, Davey is building his wooden boat, wholly oblivious. From our perch, we can see that he has the magazine open. Its glossy colorful pages reflect the sun, as does the water's skin. It dazzles our eyes. The instructions in the magazine are clear and meticulous. Davey is following those instructions, carefully, running a plane over pale wood again and again. The dream-lens can smell the wood, fragrant, mysterious.

Not fifty feet away, under the water, our hair is on fire like a turn-of-the-century torch, yours and mine, our legs are spread-eagled because the water seems to be drawing them apart, and our skin is as pale as milk. Davey is shaving his wood and oblivious to our presence. We are indeed drowning, forever, and Hannah Lee's voice seems to be in the wind, like the children's, like music, but no one can hear what she is saying, least of all me.

Ingrid Hill says, "I am the author of the novel Ursula, Under, a PhD graduate of the University of Iowa, and the mother of twelve children. I have published many, many short stories and one collection of fiction, Dixie Church Interstate Blues. I'm at work on a new novel whose name has changed twice already & may change again."