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knows it can’t be a monkey, yet that seems the best thing to call it. Corey stands, trapped by the sight of it, just like Tommy and Chancey are. He can’t help it, can’t help the staring. It’s like you can’t get your eyes to adjust, the thing won’t come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can’t focus it. Until Corey gets a little dizzy. And he backs away from it, Tommy still attached to his shirt, and when they get a safe distance, he turns his back and hurries a little on down the creek.
    The big monkey drift is caught in a bend, and after the bend, the flood trash slackens, the monkey drift a kind of bottleneck. Then Chester’s backyard, his garden, a few leftover seed packets impaled on stakes and crusted with dark flood muck—even dried up, it’s dark, that kind of mud. A rusted swingset his kids used to play on, them grown and long gone and the swingset tipped over. Sorry-ass Chester’s backyard, then the sorry-ass yard of Little Scotty Piles, and, Slatybank . Corey is thinking. Not like this hollow, this place. What if they lived in Slatybank Hollow?

    Slatybank has trains moving through it, and not just any old trains. Dad went up in there to see a man about a truck part, and he took Dane and Corey with him, and Corey has seen many a train, but not a train like that train in Slatybank. Slatybank is a nice-sized hollow, wider than this one, and emptier, too, lots of people having left out from Slatybank Hollow, a leaving place, which is better than a stuck-in hollow like theirs.The houses and trailers and stands and churches up and down Slatybank Hollow in various years-along of abandonment, some just abandoned to where the grass is too high, and others abandoned to where the windows are busted out, and others abandoned right down to rubble. Of course, some people never left at all, like the man with the truck part, and Dad drove them up in there, tracing the train track, then crossing it, then tracing it on the other side, then crossing it again. The hollow way, way longer than Yellowroot. The train track drawing your eye to it, fresh rail and rock, so much newer, shinier, than the buckling paved road. Then they got to the man’s house, and Dad told them to stay outside and be good. They filled their pockets with big pieces of gravel off the railroad bed and then whizzed the rocks at beer bottles they’d set up on the rails. Dane always missed. Corey always hit. Then they heard her coming.
    The train came from up the hollow and three locomotives it took to pull her, the very first one blasting the beer bottles into the air to shatter on rock. And then the gondolas, so neat-heaped with even mounds of coal the coal looked clean, and the black gons, too, that was the thing, the gons new as fresh-baked bread, the gons hauling out their virgin load of coal, gons that had never felt dust nor rain nor cinder nor mud and chock chock chock chock them passing beautiful. So just-out-of-the-factory brilliant Corey wondered was there a train assembly line up the hollow chock chock chock chock them passing beautiful. Corey couldn’t help but draw up closer CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK heatful
they feel, and the odors of metal and oil and creosote the train weight pumps from the ties CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK Corey creeping up to where he could no longer hear Dane’s yells, Corey washed in the breath of the just-made train, him gut-feeling the train breath in a place in his body he didn’t know he had, a place deeper than he knew his body got, the train force humming the teeth in his head, and how the air breaks between cars staggered him back, the sudden miss of metal making more there the smash force of the gon following CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK a no time dangle time train wash wafting up and over them time and then. Finished.
    Corey, tottery, gutted. Dane behind him yelping does he want to get killed, and Corey grappling after it, the last coal car, no caboose, vanishing