| | I had been walking along the train tracks, on my way into town, or on my way back home again, it doesn't really matter which, when somehow I found my self in the Orchard, the Orchard of Innumerable Plans, we used to call it. In those days we were always getting lost in the Orchard, always showing up late for things and saying, by way of explanation, "Oh, I found myself in the Orchard". That day the bullet made its presence known to me somehow, called out to me from amid the mosquitoes and the fresh and wrinkled rotten apples in the tall and matted summer grass. I picked it up because it was seductive, this sleek piece of violence in the vague and humid hum and rot and sweetness of the summer Orchard. |