Oh, I finally unpacked my Waterman pens. I’m using the “diamond-black” Edson I bought in Denver last year. I have consigned the yellow pencil stub to a drawer. On a whim, I seriously considered burying the damned thing, but then I started worrying over whether the graphite (a form of carbon, I believe) would be bad for the earthworms and moles and such. I thinkI read somewhere that residual graphite is harmless, but I’ve already got enough on my conscience without having to worry about whether I’ve poisoned the grubs. I’ll do my best to keep making entries in this notebook. The pens make it much easier, and it’s not like I’ve got a hell of a lot else to do, is it?

I have been awake maybe twenty minutes, and the nightmare is still buzzing about my skull like a hungry swarm of mosquitoes. Nothing, though, that I can conveniently swat away. Also, I have misplaced my glasses, and, no matter how hard I squint, the blue college-ruled lines on this page shift and sway, grudgingly resolving for a few seconds at a time before they fade and blur again. Still, fuck the coffee, I’m going to get this down before I lose it. Last night, I read back over my two previous entries, and hell, they don’t even sound like me. They sound like some pale ghost of my voice. Not even a decent echo. What does a writer become when she can no longer write? What’s left over when the words don’t come when called? What did Echo become after she was slaughtered for spurning Pan, or after her collusion with Zeus was discovered and so she was punished by Hera, or after her rejection by Narcissus? Those pages seem, at best, my ownecho, a waning, directionless cry in this wilderness to which I have exiled myself. But, the dream. Write down the dream and save the rest for later. Write down what you can recall about the dream.

I was at the kitchen table, just as I am now, smoking and staring out at the shadows gathering as the sun set, the afternoon melting into twilight. I could see the dark smudge of Ramswool Pond, and the low, rocky hills around the farm, the trees pressing in, new-growth trees where once there were fields for grazing sheep and apple orchards and whatever else. I was sitting here, smoking, and the longer I watched, the more unnerving the shadows became, as the coming night drew them ever sharper. I felt as though they were becoming substantial, corporeal things, and that the sun’s retreat westward was releasing them from unseen prisons, below the ground or from out of unseen dimensions which exist, always, alongside this visible world. There were no lights on in the house, I think, and it had already fallen into darkness around and behind me, and that darkness seemed inhabited, populated by dozens of muttering men and women. I would try to make out what they were saying, but always their words slipped away from me. And all the while, I suspected the murmuring was meant to distract me from all that lay outside the kitchen window. With hindsight, I might even be so reckless as to guess that this intent was merciful. But, since I could not make head nor tails of the murmurers’ attempts at communication, I watched the window, instead. I realized here that I was not sitting in the kitchen of Mr. Blanchard’s old farmhouse, but in a small screening room, a movie theater, and the window was, in truth, a screen. It’s a cheap fucking trick, the kind of unimaginative, low-budget legerdemain at which dreaming minds seem to excel or in which they only compulsively indulge. I sat in my theater seat and stared out the window, which was now, of course, merely the projected image from concealed mechanisms hidden somewhere behind me, flickering moments fused to celluloid. The muttering voice had become other members of the audience, though I could not actually see any of them (and I am not certain that I tried). I don’t often go to the movies. But Amanda liked to, so she usually went without me. That was something else we might have shared, but I couldn’t be bothered.

On the screen, I see the kitchen’s window frame, and the fallow, overgrown land beyond, and I see the shadows growing bolder. And then I see you,Amanda, and you’re standing with your back to me, but, still, I know it’s you. You’re standing at the first of the stone walls, staring out towards the flooded granite quarry. Your shoulders are slumped, your head down, almost bowed, and you’re wearing a simple yellow dress, and even though you are too far away for me to make out such details, I can see that the fabric has been imprinted with tiny flowers of one sort or another, a yellow calico. Your long hair hangs down as though you wear a veil, and it’s matted and tangled, as if you haven’t combed it in days and days. That’s so unlike you, and I began, here, to suspect I was only dreaming, because you’d never be out with your hair in such a dreadful state, not out where someone might seeyou.

And then the deer are coming out of the shadows gathered beneath the trees, and there are other animals, though it’s hard for me to be sure what they are. Animals. Things smaller than the deer, things that move swiftly, mostly creeping along nearer to the ground. I think the deer are all coming toyou, that possibly you have called them somehow, and I think, for a second or two, I am delighted at the thought and wonder why you never told me you knew how to call deer. I think back on the stories you told me about your childhood in Georgia, that your father was a hunter, so I consider that maybe it was a talent you learned from him. And it occurs to me now that, a page or two back, I shifted fucking tense, past to present. I fucking hatethat, but I’m still so asleep and afraid I’ll forget something important — that I have already forgotten — if I wait and try to wake up before putting this down.

In the dream, I think the deer are being called to you, the deer and those other animals. But you do not raise your head to greet them, do not make any sign whatsoever to acknowledge their approach. And I think, Maybe she knows that would only scare them away.The movie has a soundtrack, though I think I only become aware of it as the animals approach. I can hear their feet crunching softly in the grass, can hear wind, and what I think might be you singing very softly to yourself. All this time my girlfriend could sing to deer, and I had no idea. How crazy is that? And before much longer, those nervous, long-leggedy beasts and their damp noses would be pressing in all about you, and in that instant you seemed to me some uncanonized Catholic saint. Our Lady of the Bucks and Does and Fawns. And here, I think, I am grown quite certain that I am dreaming, but it hardly seems to matter, because there you are, so perfect, and I need to see you, and I need to know what is about to happen.

And here, too, the dream shifts again, canvas and plywood backdrops swapped and costumes changed in a seamless, unmarked segue. Now it is some otherevening, and I am not in the kitchen of the rented farmhouse off Barbs Hill Road, and I am not in that anonymous theater, either. Amanda is with me now, and we are no longer divided by windowpanes or silver screens or time. I am telling her how sorry I am, how it’ll never happen again, and she’s on her knees, huddled on a sidewalk washed in the sodium-arc glow of a nearby streetlight. She holds a stick of chalk gripped tightly in her left hand, drawing something on the concrete at my feet. By slow degrees, I scrape up enough comprehension to see that what she’s making resembles the squares of a child’s hopscotch game, only instead of numbers, each square contains a line from the magpie rhyme, with the first square marked Earth. In the second she has written “One for anger,” and in the third “Two for mirth.” She is only just beginning to fill in the fourth square, the chalk loudly scratching and squeaking against the pavement, and as I talk she shakes her head, no, no, no. She will not listen, will not hear me, and it does not matter whether I am a liar or sincere, for we have already come to a place where actions have forever eliminated even the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.