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girl saw me and ran to hide. By noon I had to lie down and sleep in the shade of a big river tree. What? I woke up asking myself. What is it?
    I vomited all afternoon.
    G REAT C REVICE
    Slept under the stars with three other monks. Woke in terror to footsteps in the fallen leaves. It must have been midnight. I lay bathed in sweat, trembling and prepared for assassins, and saw soft animal faces among the branches and the stars and remembered the fawn on the cliff path two days ago, her eyes black with flies. She had not been dead long; she had not lived long either, perhaps four months. A kind of circular song shook my body until morning.
    I had a conversation with a young woman on the bridge. She and I were crossing in opposite directions. For my part, I was coming back from collecting supplies from the bus; she was leaving the settlement for some guilty occupation, or so it seemed from the way she hurried, and kept her eyes on the corrugated deck, only looking up at the last moment.
    She stopped and said, “You are ill.” In her small dark face was the ripple of a question. Perhaps just concern. Perhaps fear: she was in the territory of men who do not farm or go out to hunt.
    â€œYes. I am feeling unwell.”
    â€œI hope you will soon feel better,” she said.
    We stood still. I set down my load. A warm fragrant breeze blew from the fields. Dust swept against our faces. We turned together to listen to it hiss through the river trees.
    â€œDo you hear a child singing?” she said.
    â€œIt’s only wind in the cables.”
    We stepped to the edge, our clothes flapping.
    â€œIt is in the river,” she said. “Up there.” She pointed upstream at a distant tangle of branches and bamboo. “Where my son drowned.” She looked at me in fierce sorrow and turned away. I watched her cross the bridge to the road and disappear.
    What sights we witnessed in each other on that bridge under the weight of a child’s death. And she was beautiful, proud, hurt, angry. Beneath me the current had wrapped a blue plastic bag around one of the pylons.
    E ARTH G RANARY
    The settlement woman was probably twenty-six or twenty-seven though she carried her small dense slender body with the self-conscious ferocity of a girl. Her face and arms, especially her neck, were dusky, such a contrast to Imogen’s fair skin. Just now a heron laughed. I am not myself. I’m cold, then hot. My stomach and sides and upper arms have a bright red rash, though the nausea has passed. I’m concerned to know whether she has returned to this side of the river, my imagination fired by images of her meeting a lover or an enemy alone on the desolate country road. Delirium draws me to embroider the story with darker shades of violence. Actors play out such stories in discrete, disjoint, feverish units, making films.
    A moment ago the bell sounded the start of night. Down below, a circle of torches burns, voices and drumbeats rising into the air, fading and surging with the intermittent wind.
    Now it is quiet but for the occasional laughter and yowls and hoots of men.
    In my hot fevered state I sense invasion, forced change, instability. Six crushed beer cans found under the old cedar above East Shrine have fed my new fear of roving gangs. Some of these men are not as poor as they seem and are venturing freely through our community and onto the lower slopes of the mountain. Unfamiliar, unwelcome, especially when we’re preparing for autumn.
    The master told me I was about to do something sacred or forbidden, but he would not say what. Something to dispel wind-heat. Sitting with him earlier this evening, I was light-headed.
    â€œDo you know what you will do?” he said.
    â€œI feel like buying cigarettes.”
    He laughed.
    â€œOr perhaps I need to get rid of something.”
    The master said to calm my thoughts and loosen my robe. “I will balance your body.” He lit a candle and I undid my