Marfisa on the steps beside her scoops more golden dust from a plastic baggie. “I did no such thing.” She presses it over the last visible edge of that ragged wound.

“You didn’t,” Ellen winces, “tell me the truth.”

“And if I had?” Marfisa smooths the dampening, darkening dust with a knuckle. “Would you have listened?” Sits back, eyeing the almost empty baggie. “This will have to do.”

“I need a shower.”

“In time. Let the owr do its work. How does it feel? Don’t touch.”

Ellen shifts her shoulder. The clumped dust, settling, fuses as she eyes it to a cleanly golden shell, gleaming without slough or crack or flake. “You aren’t human,” she says. “Are you.”

“No,” says Marfisa, getting to her feet. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

Ellen takes Marfisa’s hand to pull herself upright, working her shoulder back and up, forth and down, “That’s just weird,” she says.

“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa.

Up the steep stairs lofted from the landing, up and up to a plain brown door ajar at the top and into a brightly airy kitchen, “Can I at least get clean?” Ellen’s saying, as she tries to hold up the blood-soaked lop of her T-shirt with a bloodstained hand.

While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.

The first of them steps from the kitchen, a brighter room off that way, walls the color of toothpaste. His rich red hair flops from a high widow’s peak, his baggy ivory shirt open at the throat, his red check vest tightly buttoned, and his hands are warily empty. He starts at a creak above, but it’s the second of them, making her way down the stairs, tall enough she needs to stoop, white tank top and a heavy leather kilt, her fine long hair a watery green. She nods as the third of them steps from the hall beneath the stairs, shabby velvet frock coat over orange coveralls, he’s shrugging at them both, and applause smatters up from somewhere below.

The front door cracks open. The fourth of them tips in a grey-epauletted shoulder, followed by a quizzical scowl on a beefy face. The first of them nods, the third shrugs again, and the second steps off the stairs to yank the front door from his grasp, swinging it open to allow the last of them into the room, Chillicoathe, the Harper, who strides to the middle of it, his bulky sweater, his cargo shorts, his big yellow beard and his wide-eyed gaze, fixed only on that upthrust sword.

Up onto the loading dock, Gloria losing an armload of gown for every armload she gathers back up. “Need a hand?” says Melissa.

“I got it,” says Gloria, chin propped by the precarious pile.

Melissa opens a smaller door there by the large overhead. The warehouse within is quiet, dim, lit only here and there by this lamp still shining from a stall, that trouble light hung low, but mostly by the warmly golden glow of the great tub out in the middle of it all. Gloria turns about, chasing a trailing drape of skirt, turning about again at the sound of footsteps hastening close, “Chatelaine!” cries someone, Charlichhold, approaching. “Let us help you with your burden.”

“Don’t call me that,” mutters Gloria. “Wait a minute.” Melissa’s headed off toward the unlit stage, where the shadowy bulk of the Buggane’s sat, “Hey,” says Gloria, setting off after her. “Hey!”

The key tucked away in her hoodie, she opens the toolbox on the seat beside her. Lifts aside a massive cleaver and a thinly elegant honing steel to pull out a tiny knife, the blade of it maybe half the length of its handle, whittled to a wicked point. She tucks it away in her hoodie. Takes another knife, as pointed but much longer, in her left hand, blade of it laid back against her forearm, and one more item, a lumpy wad of something rubbery and brown. Snap and clack the lid of the toolbox.

Quick across the street and up the shallow curl of driveway past a garage door shut up tight to the corner where she crouches, back to the house, silently panting through her wide-open mouth. Shakes out the wad, blankly goggled, blackly crackle, and, careful of the handle of the knife, ducks to slip it on, a horse’s head, loosely floppy, a lopping wobble as she tugs it into place.

From the corner into darkness, through stiff hedge-sheaves with a minimum of rustle, then wary, sidelong steps down a steepening slope, fingertips brushing the wall beside her as the the bulk of the house lofts from the ground into darkness, just the hint of a flicker, candlelight, perhaps, ahead. When she can she ducks beneath, a step, two, criss-cross to a shadow solid enough to hold, a piling, and another, there.

“You sure?” says Jack.

“Yes,” says Jo. Taking delicate hold of the wire-wrapped hilt, turning the blade over in its bath. Wiping her fingers on meagre grass.

“There’s no,” says Jack, “strings. If that, it that’s what you’re. Thinking?” Flat on his back in his button-dappled jacket, head pillowed on a rumpled sleeping bag. Smoke tendrils from the hand cupped on his chest.

“What I’m thinking,” says Jo, “is I don’t want any.”

“Who doesn’t like pot?”

She leans over cauldron, pool, blade, the vinegar faintly hazed, wispiest threads of rusty milk seeping from those orange blotches, fading to nothingness almost immediately. Her lips purse, her shoulders shift, a suggestion of a shrug. “Who,” Jack’s saying, clink of buttons as he lifts a hand, “doesn’t,” back of it hung above his supine face. Crunch of grass as Roy steps out from around the tent, chewing absently, dipping to nuzzle up another scant mouthful. “I was,” says Jack, hand floating down to settle on Roy’s haunch, that shivers at his touch.

“Maybe you’d better,” Jo sighs, “just give me however much of whatever it is that’s left, so you don’t smoke yourself into orbit.” He giggles, sputtering into a coughing fit. Jo’s holding out her hand. “Come on,” she says.

He’s peering at a singed twist of paper and ash. “Ossifer,” he says, “I think,” more giggles, “you’re too late, officer.”