LITMIR.BIZ

       JUST a thin metal rod no longer than your finger.

       A thin metal rod, looped at one end to give you something to grip, flattened and slotted at the other. She told me what there was to tell about it—even the sound it made, the blood it sometimes drew. She told me how a tab would fit into the slot, how when you twisted the loop a strip of metal or the lid itself would wrap around the other end. I don’t think you would open a can of shortening this way anymore. Or a tin of sardines. I don’t think anyone would open anything this way.

       She told me other things: that I knew how to walk, that I slept in a bed, that I’d learned to talk but didn’t have much to say. She told me what I was afraid of.

       She told me this about myself, and some of it hasn’t changed.

       THERE might have been blood. There would have been sharp edges and, unwinding the lid or the strip of tin from it, she might have felt one before she gave it to me—just a thin metal rod that for a while was mine.

       I don’t know what became of it.

       I must have put it down. Sometime during the course of the day, I must have put it down and forgotten about it.

       After the blood. Before there was a moon.

       AT night, she told me, was when it happened.

       In the small hours, she said, was when I woke up, if I’d slept at all, climbed out of bed and went looking for it. Roamed the dark sleeping house, working the shadows like a prowler. The hall, the bathroom, the stairs—I went everywhere but I never turned on a light. There might have been a moon. I looked until my looking woke them and she came for me. I could have been anyone. I could have been someone who’d come to take something, or everything, but she knew who it was, she said. She wasn’t afraid.

       The stairs, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen.

       It happened every night.

       AFTER the second time, she told me, or the third time, she said, when she’d put me back to bed, she crawled in and stayed with me till I went back to sleep. She said it took me a long time, she had to come into my bed more than once. She said she stayed with me and told me stories, looking for the one that would make me stop. Sometimes she rhymed.

       We looked out the window.

       Out there, she said she told me.

       The world, she said she’d said.

       We lived at the end of the street. There was nothing beyond us.

       Everyone in the world was asleep, she said, except for us. When the world sleeps, she said, everyone else must, too, because the world won’t wake up again, she said, until they do.

       It would go right on sleeping. It wouldn’t let the sun come up. The night, she said, won’t stop.

       She didn’t mean to rhyme but this is what she told me. I think I remember some of it, and I believe the rest.

       I believe I do.