if in a haze and the logic of clearing this
vast expanse of earth and rock escapes him. He thinks of each rock as
the buttress of a treasure box he has just hidden and is loath to
dislodge further stones. He ponders Christ's parable of the Kingdom of
Heaven likened unto treasure buried in a field. For reasons unclear but
not necessarily related to the blood juice, he imagines the fence to be
the one at Chancellorsville where a Union regiment died to a man and
was found by a burial brigade with apple blossoms stuck to each
bloodied face.

Evasive now, he perceives the fence to be the one stopping Pickett's
charge at Gettysburg or that fence at Mons in northern France which
turned a war. He begins to rummage through the piled stones for spent
bullets and other mementoes of a great battle. He relives the story of
the Angel of Mons[1].

As he dislodges more and more stones, he showers chunks of limestone
and granite backward onto the barren field. The shower of rock is
somewhat reminiscent of Ungava's meteor spray or splintered debris
forced down a soldier's foxhole. Perhaps a runic stone will fall from
tangled roots when he burns the dead stumps of trees deciphering once
and for all why men labour or think at all. The fence swirls on and on
in growing amnesia becoming the very touchstone of all purpose, stones
from Jericho's Wall or the passkeys taken from our material existence.
Gabriel, the archangel, will sound his trumpet here, he is assured. The
dead and unburied of nameless acts of toil and dread will stand a
stone's breadth across this fence. The Face of God will be seen in the
pact nature has made with earth and stone.

He turns and puts his hat by a tree, lifts a canteen and imagines what
all might be should vegetation ever be coded and stones prophets to
their accordion earth.

[1] Allied soldiers at the first battle of Mons believed certain of
their numbers had escaped destruction by the intervention of a Heavenly
spectre.

SEAEGGS

The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they
returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his
broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to
these waters.

"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve--keep it simple--use
words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to
his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily
accented Spanish broadly emphasizing