I went home and took off my goggles and Dare hosed me down by the gravel drive and already I could tell it was too quiet.

Out in the wet grass the pale exposed bellies of the frogs were drying and growing taut. An indictment. Shining silver beneath the blue sky, their arms flung back and limp. Brown speckled fish were scattered on the swampy bank and near them the soft, wet, lifeless form of a rabbit hit by a flying stone or killed by the blast. I knew I should take it for the fur, but I buried it instead. I wept as I put the fish into the basket and carried them home.

Dare made trout and wild garlic and a salad from things we’d grown. After all the venison we’d been eating, it was light and clean and delicious.

When we sat on the porch, there was no piping song calling up from the pond. No echo of peepers from the hollow. I could see the land as I’d never seen it, shockingly vivid and close. Fireflies glowed, afloat in the dark clearing. The forest rose around us in the distance and the meadow near our house was a tall tangled mass of grasses. I could see my uncle too. His skin weathered, hair shaved nearly to his scalp. His eyes pale and almond shaped. His body solid. Dare was alone except for me, living in a one-story ranch house that sat upon a large underground room at the edge of a flowering hillside in a tiny town with dirt roads. He was strong and kind, had trouble understanding things.

That evening the house materialized around me as if it had long been obscured by a bank of fog. In our living room a sunken plaid couch covered with a wool blanket hunched against the wall in front of a pellet stove. Every room had prints or paintings of the forest and of deer and raccoons and other animals that lived in the woods. There were no pictures of people on the walls—not even pictures of us. There were some threadbare chairs, and a coffee table piled with my books. An oval braided rug covered the kitchen floor; the table was painted pale blue and had a metal top. The pantry was full of shelves, packed with mason jars, canned vegetables, dried beans, braids of garlic. The place had a strong smell I’d never noticed before.

I wandered into my room, shocked that the books I’d brought with me were still there, Dewey decimal system stickers on their spines. I sat, silent on my bed, astonished by the relentless emptiness of forms. Models of airplanes and cars and monsters were sloppily painted and strangely arranged on a dresser made of glossy wood-grain plastic. The room contained a tyranny of objects: rain boots, sneakers, chin-up bar, a fragile table lamp made from antlers. A spool of thread and a half-empty drinking glass were particularly disturbing, sitting there on the nightstand like evidence.