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fire. Too stupid. March right through it. Then all you got is a bunch of walkin torches trying to eat your guts.
    He nods slowly, and she sees that he already knew that about fire and meatskins. He was just testing her.
    Sarah Mary Williams, he says, pronouncing each name as though reading it on a billboard in the distance. My brother Abraham doesn’t believe you come up from the south. He’s suspicious-minded like that. Me, I believe you.
    Go ahead and both of you believe whatever you like. It’s a free country.
    They are quiet for a while. She inhales the smoke from Moses’s cigar, and it tastes sweet in her lungs. When it seems like he has nothing more to say, she gets up from the chair and turns to leave. That’s when he speaks again, without looking at her, with no recognition of her going or coming.
    This hole here, he says, gesturing to the dark space of night sky in the maw of the broken-out pane. It was here when they first came. Somebody must of jumped. When they took up residence, they just widened it and made it into a scenic lookout.
    Who’s they? Ain’t you one of them?
    I’m a traveler by nature. I been lots of places. The provender of the earth’s good enough for my kind. Abraham, he likes this place. I ain’t so sure though.
    How come?
    Right at this moment, this place is a fortress. But if a man was inclined to do so, he could open up one of those loading bay doors in the middle of the night, and suddenly we’re in a death house.
    That’s when he looks up at her, his eyes level with hers eventhough he’s sitting and she’s standing, squinting at her through the smoke of his cigar, his fingers picking flakes of fallen tobacco from his beard.
    You know what I think? she says.
    What do you think?
    She points through the hole into the dark throat of the diseased landscape.
    I think you’re more dangerous than what’s out there.
    Well, little girl, he says, that’s a funny thing you just uttered. Because I was just now thinkin the same thing about you.
    She leaves him sitting there, glancing back just once before she goes through the stairwell door and observing how the cloud of smoke from his cigar gets pulled in wisps out the dark gaping hole in the glass wall—as though it is his soul, too large for his massive frame and seeping out the pores of his skin and wandering circuitous back into the wilderness where it knows itself true among the violent and the dead.

    B ACK IN her small room she takes a Nembutal and falls asleep almost immediately. It’s probably the pill that makes her slow to comprehend what’s happening an hour later when the key is slotted into the door. She is so deep down inside herself that it’s difficult to climb that ladder to the top where things are actually happening. The key in the door, the rattle, the turning of the knob, and the airy squeak as the door swings inward once and then back shut. She scrambles to the surface of her consciousness, arriving there and shaking herself awake just as the light in her room is turned on.
    Abraham, she says.
    I came to kiss you good night.
    She squints and rubs her eyes against the sudden light. He’s standing, hunched over and swaying a bit, drunk. His leer makes her take stock of what she has on—just a T-shirt and underpants.
    Get outta here, Abraham.
    Hey, he says, looking around, is this your blade? Pretty nifty.
    He picks up the gurkha from the table and unsheathes it. Then he swings it through the air a few times making swishing sounds with his mouth like a boy playing swords.
    Put it down.
    He sets it back down on the table, but not because she asked him to.
    You played some good cards tonight. You’re one of those tough girls, aren’t you? One of those rough-and-tumble girls. You like to play with the boys.
    She pulls herself up on the mattress, her back against the wall, her head still cloudy and muddled.
    You better get, she says.
    But you’re still a girl where it counts.
    He comes around the table and steps