A woman builds a wooden cow in her dreams. The dark, sweet, heat inside where she kneels, the interior smooth and the color of weak tea.  The Trojans got it wrong, after all,  the structure not to take, but to be taken.  Not to get in, but to get out.  She waits in the field for days before the creature approaches, the loneliest of sighs in its throat. Mud in her hair and blood thick with want. Goats frenzy the pasture and she wakes to an empty bed, a yawn of space outside the windows, jet black and the sound of cicadas humming into song.

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My brother builds a fort out of particle board and chicken wire. All summer he hoards canned soup and flashlight batteries. Speaks to no one but the occasional crow that perches at the top of a spire made of broken antennae...

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