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prison. 
    In the kitchen, I heard water running, dishes clattering against each other. Someone was humming, the faintest hum. A song, but I couldn’t catch it. The sound made me want to cry, remembering my life in the world I’d left behind. Row being bathed in the kitchen sink. Then him in my arms in his towel, his little head against my chest. I was breathing too fast. Every time he was offered back to me, I believed it, and then I had to remember he was gone. 
    Fake. But what if it wasn’t? Those stamps. Approved. Someone would know. I’d find someone who knew what he was. I felt drunk. I pictured my house, standing out here in the dead center of nowhere, no neighbors, no fence. I didn’t have a gun. Nothing to protect myself, protect my house. What was being asked of me? Make shoes? Keys and bindings. Iron and doors? I didn’t understand.
    I had to call the prison. I was resolved, but as far as I could see, there weren’t even any phone lines out here. Maybe they’d been taken away by whatever rural phone company there was, after the house next door caught fire. I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. I’d dropped it in a trashcan somewhere in the Midwest, when the Greyhound pulled over to let lost souls stretch. Now I regretted it. 
    I drove into Ione again, late at night. Moon up, yellow and thin as a toenail clipping. My granddad had been a captain working in the Gulf of Mexico, but early in his career, he’d been second mate on a Norwegian freighter. I thought about a story he’d told me once, about a ship made of the nail clippings of the dead. I heard him again like I was six years old, sitting with him on his porch in New Orleans. 
    “Naglfar, they call it,” said my granddad. “The nailship. At the end of the world, Naglfar comes loose from its mooring. You have to trim the fingernails of the dead, boy, or they go to build that ship. You don’t want to leave a dead man with his fingernails long.”
    I saw my granddad’s white beard, his dark skin, and his glittering eyes. He stretched his fingernails out to show me. Trimmed to the rind. He looked at my face, and then laughed. 
    “Your gran told me not to tell you those stories anymore, or you’ll wet the bed, won’t you?”
    “Will not,” I said. But I did, later that night, imagining the nail ship making its way through some terrible ocean, an anchor chain made of toenails, and a hull made of fingernails torn from their beds. I had nightmares about Naglfar for years. Now I was having waking nightmares about iron growing out of bones and I couldn’t make sense of them. I imagined nails, iron nails. I’d read a story years before about a woman who grew fingernails instead of hair, and I imagined that for a drunken moment, a miserable creature covered in hard, sharp scales.
    On the steering wheel, I looked at my own fingernails. For the first time in years I’d let them grow beyond their edges. What kind of fool thought he wasn’t five minutes from dying? I shook my head. I was losing it. 
    Some old story, all of this. I was here, in Oregon, in October, working in heat hot enough to bake my brain. I didn’t think I needed to go to a hospital, but then I wondered if maybe I did. I hadn’t gone after what had happened at home. I couldn’t imagine going to a hospital when it wasn’t me who was injured, but my mother had tried to get me to go. “If you don’t sleep, you die,” she’d insisted, not realizing that dying was what I wanted. 
    Above me, there were shooting stars, and below me there were rabbits on the highway, white shapes moving across the black, discs of brightness that looked like floating Christmas lights, and then resolved into eyes. I swerved to keep from hitting them. 
    I drove past the grain elevators and the little cemetery, its stones yellow under the moon. None of my thoughts were good. Who was buried there? Was there a plot of earth waiting for a madman and a murderer?
    Whatever he was, whoever he was, Dusha