There is a dusty window to look out of and into the street beyond, and through it you can see the movie posters plastered outside the store just on the town limit, which you always thought so rebellious in your sheltered childhood. You used to imagine you could see the line dividing us and them with no room for indecision, the home and the horror plainly visible and cleanly cut out. One sweltering August day, you’d had to climb into the passenger seat of your uncle’s rusty pickup so the two of you could get car parts from a few towns over. You don’t remember much of it — you were young, though not so young that you hadn’t started to regress into the same old patterns as everyone else — but you remember cranking down the window and breathing in air you knew was not different but felt that way. You remember seeing the cumulus clouds towering above the road and wondering how something so huge could stay up there without falling down and crushing the world like a giant’s foot swinging out of bed after a long sleep, the dusty red of the mesa and the dusty grey of the road stretching on into the horizon for what seemed to you like forever.

That was the one and only time you ever left town. In your dreams, you do it over and over again. In your dreams, you have lungs made of metal and skin like armour, and none of it bothers you because everything has gone back to the way that it used to be. In your dreams, you return to that mesa and measure it, squinting with your thumb level to your eye to judge the height. You never have climbing equipment but you’re able to scale it all anyway, chasing the heady clouds, breaking the flat summits just as the sun dips below the edge of the world like that same giant to bed and this is when you wake up, too, cracking your eyes open into the watery grey of your room and feeling distinctly like something has been lost to you. In the scant few hours of your misplaced dreaming you are able to reach squarely into another life.

In your closet there is a suit and a shirt and a pair of patched-up slacks, clothes all moth-eaten like your fingertips. You asked your father to help you tie your tie once and he smiled so big his eyes wrinkled up until they were shining, black-backed beetles like the beetles you crush as you walk around this big old house. You do not mean to do this because you think there is value in every life (not a sentiment you used to hold) but they are so small and so quick to get in the way. Your father did not often smile, but he did snap pencils in half. His workbench in the garage used to be littered with them, gnawed on, the leads sticking out of their wooden husks like bones out of split limbs. You burned them years ago to keep warm, shivering on the floor in front of the fireplace. You were so grateful for them, so grateful you could put off tearing up the floorboards for just one night more. Not much is left of your big old house, just the blackboard and the ironing board, memories of patchy grass like eyelashes.

There’s a chair on the porch at the front of the house, outside the windows you used to wipe down so meticulously, working off the grime in that early time when you still cared for appearances. You could measure the care you have now out in coffee spoons, like that poem. You need new coffee spoons because yours have gone bent and discoloured, but there’s no coffee spoons because no one sends them out here anymore. No books of poems, either. They were about the eighth thing to go, after the antique dining chairs but before the non-antique dining table. Ghost town, ghost home, ghost man.

Not so long ago, bad men shot things at each other until the air turned poison and the sun turned black. Boys will be boys. Their fodder was all people you knew, people you went to school with, maybe, people who climbed into trucks giving you dirty looks, calling you coward, saying you didn’t honour the land. They had it all backwards. None of them dreamed about anything but mahogany desks and shining black muzzles, a spick-span uniform and something exciting to fight for. Never the land. None of them dream of climbing anything, except for maybe the doomed tower of their own misplaced ambitions.