Sunlight cakes the earth like something thick, like something you could sink your fingers in, like something that could stain your cleanest shirt. Turkey vultures hang, waiting for the nick of time to plummet them. Flags snap at wind. Children lift their vulgar shouts and flirt with shade, chasing shrieks from pine to pine. Peeling back the unremarkable, I wet my hands in the plodding miracle of light and shade, of single file lines, of beer cans jangling down the empty street, of all the prosy things that make a world, and hear a humdrumming, a daily beat that measures us, trembling through the void.