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someday being a deep and sensitive novelist who commanded women’s love and men’s respect. All through junior high and high school he scribbled in three-subject notebooks, filling them with scads of poems and short stories. Most of the stories mixed baseball and romance, with a few sliding over into science fiction.
    Sam soon learned deep and sensitive is another way of saying lonesome, and the closest he’d come so far to commanding women’s love and men’s respect through writing was his job as sports and entertainment intern at the Greensboro Record in Greensboro, North Carolina.
    My favorite story he wrote back in high school was the one in which Death turned into a cute little mouse named Bob. Bob wore green shorts and a red football jersey, and he skittered across people while they slept, which killed them so he could collect their souls. Sam said the human soul looks and tastes like Swiss cheese.
    Dying from being touched by a mouse became known as getting Bobbed. People were so scared of getting Bobbed that they took to sleeping under loads of blankets with their head covered so no skin showed. Outside of bed they wore layers and layers of polyester mouse-proof clothing and hoods and masks and gloves up to here so no one ever saw anyone, which made them even more scared because they thought Bob might be among them in disguise. A carpenter invented a sealed wooden box that guaranteed nothing and no one could ever touch the person inside. So each and every person in the world crammed themselves into individual boxes and pulled the top shut so they could never be touched by Bob.
    One hundred years later spacemen from the planet Asthmador landed on Earth. The aliens hopped on the radio and called their wisest elders back home to ask them this question: Since every single Earthling was dead in a coffin, who put them there?
    The elders shrugged their mandibles and said, “Beats me.”
    After I read the story Sam said, “It’s an allegory.”
    “How did the Earth people know being scampered over by Bob would kill them if everyone Bob scampered over was dead and couldn’t talk?”
    Sam went all sulky, said I didn’t understand literature and he wasn’t showing me any more stories. He was lying.
    Mom is scared to death of death, but Dad took it with the attitude of a cowboy—if you can’t understand something, turn it into a joke. Once at a Pierce family reunion up at Granite Hot Springs my born-again uncle from Dubois laid into Dad about his personal savior. My cousin Stella Jean and I were weaving lupines into a hula skirt when Dad’s brother Scott stuck his face right up next to Dad and challenged him to accept Christ in his heart.
    “Don’t you believe in anything?” Scott asked.
    “I believe I’ll eat another hot dog.”
    Scott’s face and neck filled up with blood. “Where do you think you’ll go when you die, Buddy?”
    Dad slid a willow stick lengthwise through a wienie. “San Francisco.”
    ***
    The Two Ocean Lake underwater record was four minutes, fourteen seconds, held by Kim Schmidt’s cousin from Nebraska. I dived off the pier and kicked twice, found the bottom, then the root. Counting by Mississippis, I wrapped my right arm under the slick wood and held on with my left. Thirty-two Mississippi, thirty-three Mississippi, thirty-four Mississippi…At sixty Mississippi I started over. The water felt cold yet caressing, and in my mind I saw trout and weeds waving by, ignoring me. On the second sixty Mississippi my chest tightened to the point I had to release a few bubbles. The yellow came again. As a child running in circles till I fell, as a little girl bucked off her horse, now as a teenager breaking the Two Ocean Lake underwater record, yellow always preceded black. I exhaled more bubbles, but that didn’t help the chest pain. I opened my eyes—no trout, no weeds, only water and the vague form of the downed aspen on the bottom. Lungs really hurt, I’d stopped counting but couldn’t