We saved words in a plastic box with a lid, the kind people used when they had food left over, but those words took on the scent of peaches or fried meat until one by one they meant read only said: the past. You kept a few rolled in a piece of brown cloth, but they blurred in the winter damp, until every letter became a blue face or the silhouette of an animal, the kind we hardly ever glimpsed at the edge of the city. Some words, closed in a jar like fireflies, blinked then went out. Some we mistook for lozenges and sucked on them when our throats were raw. A few—hurry or hammer or love—were white with fat and had to be swallowed whole. A day will come when only the clouds can spell: horse-lying-down or woman-with-her-arms-outstretched. Night will fall before they float into boys or dogs or a stack of hay. When one curls into C or reminds us of L.