After dinner my aunt polishes the silver at the table, working each slender piece over with a yellow cloth. She touches all three sets while we clean around her, removing dirty plates and red-kissed wine glasses. I watch her fingers work over the limbs, hoping that one set will be passed to me on my wedding day.
When I was eleven she showed me Gone With the Wind. After I remember running through the field beside her house to get to the creek hiding in the woods beyond. I held up the hem of my flowered dress as I skidded down mud slicks and leapt fallen branches, my hat caught around my neck by its pale yellow ribbon.
The cloth my aunt kneads between her knuckles and fingertips is the same shade of yellow.
The dogs walk through our legs as we move to clean. My aunt calls from her seat in the dining room that I should take them out with me.
In the driveway I clap my hands, letting the sound echo against the trees, gathering the canines around me. They bury their muzzles in my palms as I talk them up, whispering to them as the shake excitedly. Then I take off running down the drive, into the darkness, and they follow, paws rushing against the stone and grass and weeds and fallen leaves.
I find myself some ways from the house, down the packed dirt road that goes around from my aunt's to her closest neighbor, with tall, skinny trees to my left and wide, rolling hills to my right. The clouds are low and thick. I stop to catch my breath. In the woods beside I hear the dogs navigating the night. The cold wraps around my throat and hands, blows into my eyes. No moon rises to guide me, no stars. I stand, blind: blackness ahead of me, blackness behind, thick as a wall come down from heaven. I strain my sight but there's no getting through it, that deep country dark. Encompassed by it, I'm alone, a beast detached from Planet Earth, untethered in the heavy night.
