by Chris Farago.
At 7 pm dusk eclipsed the shoals, leaving Carlos and me to wonder whether the mute geese remained on the shore, or if those greyshorn hunters were successful.
The tribulations at midnight were varied: filling the potatosacks with enough millet to last the week, fending off the malarial air, composing a toast to all the queens (living and not) of the last century. I gave up after twelve; Carlos made it through all twenty-three and had started on a second round when the constable came to break up his writing session.
False dawns are a common enough occurrence that we were not bothered by it; what we did not know, and would not learn until decades later, is that this indeed was that rare false false dawn, one of the few that happens each millennium whereupon the sun we see rising is the actual sun and not its understudy.
Death sat on the shoals, in a whitewashed rowboat, looking more spry than he had in a good long while. In one hand he held a goose (one that was formerly not mute but now made no sound at all); in the other was a fistule of taconite, which he slid ever so gently down the goose’s throat before casting him skyward to his release.