The pastor promises the dead don't leave us.

They come back to you, she said. It might be in a song or a dream, but they come back.

We stood in a field of grass and graves with heat pushing down and the sound of a passing train. The dead are not here, I think, but we are.

The dead may leave us in body, but they never leave us alone.

The service ended and we walked through a quiet crowd of women in summer dresses, fresh cigarettes.

I knew more than one person buried here.

Jerry asked, is Ed here?

I think so. Can we look for his grave?

We propped the bike on a gravel lane near the mausoleum and I hoped and did not hope to find Ed's grave. In less than five minutes I was looking down at his family's name. Brother, mother, father. I heard Jerry read Ed's full name. Looking at the embossed letters and pushing away at the overgrown grass, Jerry said, he won the bronze star? Huh.

He was such a cranky bastard, I said. He just hated the world.

Yes he did, Jerry said, but I liked him.

As we walked away I turned back. What day did he die?

Finding his stone again I saw June 30, 2010. Ed's last day.

I wish I had known, I said.

Around this time last year I wrote about the friend I visited today at his daughter's memorial service: Tomorrow I will see my friend and do my best to console the inconsolable.

Everyone will hug him, kiss him, and he will be shuffled along maybe not remembering each of us, the time, the day, if he had breakfast, and wondering how anything really matters.

To Ed, I wrote: A few days too late when I learned that Ed died. I remember his face and hair and funny lisp. Stories about Kansas and motorcycles and bikers in bars sloshing beer and Jack Daniels. Fists with grime under the nails. Tattoos. His stories from Vietnam rush back.

He was funny and endearing and at times insightful. He had been most places before I was born, including Vietnam.

He laughed and suffered and got up for work everyday.

War robbed many things from him and replaced them with anger, but he loved his niece and everyone knew it. He was good to her. Now the earth has him back and I didn't even know until too late.

Maybe the dead never leave. Ed is still here. My grandmother is in my head all the time, and I wonder how much of our thoughts are really our own.

The pastor promises the dead don't leave us.

They come back to you, she said. It might be in a song or a dream, but they come back.

We stood in a field of grass and graves with heat pushing down and the sound of a passing train. The dead are not here, I think, but we are.

The dead may leave us in body, but they never leave us alone.

The service ended and we walked through a quiet crowd of women in summer dresses, fresh cigarettes.

I knew more than one person buried here.

Jerry asked, is Ed here?

I think so. Can we look for his grave?

We propped the bike on a gravel lane near the mausoleum and I hoped and did not hope to find Ed's grave. In less than five minutes I was looking down at his family's name. Brother, mother, father. I heard Jerry read Ed's full name. Looking at the embossed letters and pushing away at the overgrown grass, Jerry said, he won the bronze star? Huh.

He was such a cranky bastard, I said. He just hated the world.

Yes he did, Jerry said, but I liked him.

As we walked away I turned back. What day did he die?

Finding his stone again I saw June 30, 2010. Ed's last day.

I wish I had known, I said.

Around this time last year I wrote about the friend I visited today at his daughter's memorial service: Tomorrow I will see my friend and do my best to console the inconsolable.

Everyone will hug him, kiss him, and he will be shuffled along maybe not remembering each of us, the time, the day, if he had breakfast, and wondering how anything really matters.

To Ed, I wrote: A few days too late when I learned that Ed died. I remember his face and hair and funny lisp. Stories about Kansas and motorcycles and bikers in bars sloshing beer and Jack Daniels. Fists with grime under the nails. Tattoos. His stories from Vietnam rush back.

He was funny and endearing and at times insightful. He had been most places before I was born, including Vietnam.

He laughed and suffered and got up for work everyday.

War robbed many things from him and replaced them with anger, but he loved his niece and everyone knew it. He was good to her. Now the earth has him back and I didn't even know until too late.

Maybe the dead never leave. Ed is still here. My grandmother is in my head all the time, and I wonder how much of our thoughts are really our own.

When I was a kid the world was huge and I couldn't reach the doorknobs.

Life was a game and I didn't want to take a bath tonight.

We had wake up time, breakfast time, school time, bedtime, and sometimes we had recess or dessert.

I loved surprises like triple scoops, stay-up-late nights, summer nightgowns, and birthdays.

My bedroom was a little children's palace full of stuffed animals, my favorite new shoes, and a few nightmares.

This afternoon I sat in the thick heat while I waited for a tow truck, wondering when things had changed.

I hear night set in while I count out sticky cash. Traffic noise has stopped and the ice machine hums.

I click off the neon OPEN sign and realize that I have forgotten the surprise of sunrise -- a small drop of light along the horizon ahead of each day -- a point of fire running in streaks of amber and gold as dawn comes skipping across peaks and hollows.

My shades are closed and my back is turned against dawn, but I know what the moon does and where the constellations hide -- I see them through my windshield or while walking up the path back home from the bar.

Hours later I hear a truck pass in the distance -- a driver at the wheel thinking about coffee, melted butter on toast. The early-bird news talks about things I won't know for hours.

At home on a gaudy black and chrome barstool pulled beside polished pine and stone, I find my place in the book. Soon the night rouses to trade places with another day.

I don't understand why she led me, skipping and holding my hand, into a room of monsters…

The little girl was a ghost in my dream. Laughing on the lawn beneath a lazy sun, she swung her long gold hair and said, come with me.

Inside a rundown house she brought me to a wall where pictures hung and dust covered pretty faces. She was somewhere caught in those frames, alive, smiling, and younger. I looked down at her and she was angry. I looked at the photos again, afraid.

A smiling dusty mouth yawned wide and teeth shot from the picture. I did not have a chance to force myself to look at the little girl again before I woke.

Are dreams just half-formed thoughts adrift in our heads?

The little girl was with me in the woods today when I decided -- half way past the sweating stones beneath hemlocks -- that the mood was off. I imagined shadows filled with watchers waiting to reach out from the dust. Looking at Hershey sniff around for a ball was no help, so I relied on something a trainer had said about Lily: if you're in the woods with her and her hair stands up and she barks at something, get out of there. If you can't keep this dog, we would have no trouble at all placing her in a home. These are good, protective dogs.

I looked down at Lily for reassurance and continued up the hill, across a fallen tree trunk, and through low-growing wild blueberry bushes budding with fruit.

Her whispered words brushed my ear. A friend was in an accident, she said.

As my happy thoughts faded we went through our work routine. She said goodnight to me and asked, If you hear anything, you'll let me know?

As I turned to the bar a customer said, I hope you don't think this is weird or anything, but can I ask you something?

Sure, I said.

You have been smiling since you walked in. You came in so happy and you are still smiling.

Tapping my head I said yeah, things must be loose again.

I have been thinking of my friend all night. Waiting to know what has or will happen is terrible, but holds hope.

I am thinking of you, B.

As a crush of people talked about themselves and one another, told truths and lies and secrets, he caught my eye.

Hey, Kendra…

Around him they embellished and repeated their stories in a rush of words scattered by music and beer.

Kendra, can I have a pen? I am going to give you a word, he said.

Music roared and changed and faded as excitement zipped through the crowd. He pushed his pint glass aside and made room to write.

The pen's tip wiggled across a torn napkin and he handed it to me: Guinness.

I'll take it, I said.

He looked down the bar and said, I think I know that guy from the train.

I could go ask if he knows you, I said.

No, I am not sure. Then we would have to say hi all the time and everything.

I walked away and overheard him say to his friend, I am not sure if it's the guy. Could be.

On my way back with his Heineken Light I said, you know, If you do nothing, nothing will happen…

Making friends can be a necessity, and at its purest, a choice. It does not need to work both ways, either.

Another late-nighter at the bar says, I have no friends.

Sometimes that's not up to you, I answer.

I stood under the sun in a field of wild daisies listening to birds as death stink sunk into my skin.

I had gone on a short death walk with a decaying skunk cradled on my shovel. Maggots wriggled through holes in its stretched and bloated skin. Stepping off my path in the woods I crossed a stone wall stacked in place by a forgotten farmer's hands where a weathered post and rusted hinges held barbed wire.

Beneath shadowed pockets I left him in a dark place where death would wave its wand. I turned the shovel over and stomped back home.

He will lay dead in the shade of an old farmer's wall where living things small and invisible will soon trade places and take the death away. The body will bloat, then shrink, then come apart as fur settles in tufts and a granular outline of life waits for rain to smudge it into the ground.

Death deserves sunrise, sunset, and the time it takes to come to an end.

Now we run past the skunk stones near a daisy field sloping toward spring's vernal pool that dries slowly. In late spring living things reach for dry ground.

How did this skunk spray my dogs through the fenced-in pen on Tuesday, then apparently trundle a few feet away to gasp its last beneath the rhododendron bush where I found it Saturday? How, how, how?

I had said, it still smells skunky over here.

Look for flies, Jerry said.

I heard them. Lifting the shrub's lowest limbs I saw a patch of furry black and white and ran. Lily still stinks.

Writer's block starts without a thought and keeps on going…

--------------------------

Sparks danced from a sizzling fuse and a rocket shot up, whistling and trailing smoke. Silence came and we waited and watched above the trees.

A puff and boom threw fireworks into a crackling star and falling pieces bounced on the pavement around us and in my hair. Our neighbor's young son's curiosity died quickly when the noise scared him. His little legs flew and he threw himself against his father, mouth open and eyes shining. The cries were coming.

Jerry crossed the street with a small toy tank and a lighter. The little boy watched the sparks flare and fade.

That's all it does, Jerry said. Want to watch another loud one?

The little guy just shook his head.

Tonight I listened to the sky around me bang and pop. Happy July 4.

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Lily sits under the desk gnawing on a rubber ball and stinking like a skunk. Stinky girl, Lily.