To run out for smokes and never return: a tale as old as time. I’ve run out for milk and abandoned it all, left the laundry to perfume the air with mold. Woman leaves clothes in washer and it is very unlike her! Order of things upended! But this is, in fact, the order of things. People are always leaving. I signed no contract. Except the one buried beneath this stretch of Tennessee plains dotted with dolphin-gray mockingbirds. Even the most lauded silent film star rends her garments in its wake. It’s her house I’ve stepped into with bare feet and no organ accompaniment. No one announces my arrival or celebrates my face. I might have turned as ashen as rabbit fur without a single witness, transformed into the strip of thirty-five millimeter that could burn this whole place down. The explosive capability in which the film becomes a story. So I steep expired tea. Open the windows. Call the cats. Does a film still tell a story if no one buys a ticket? I have hope, even if it’s hideous. Even if I’ve aged one thousand years. When winter thaws I sand the fire, wash my mug, tell the sparrows I’ll return when I can afford to plant a cherry tree in the yard. The kind fruit will fall from. They ask when this will be and that’s when the washer sings its Pavlovian tune. Yes, I whisper to the emerald towels, it is still a story when played to an empty theater. Some things are empty only the way a geode is empty. My husband kisses my cheek. Of course I forgot the milk. But never to lock the door behind me.