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After weeks of rain the sun shone on the lawn one morning. Marsha went into her garden with coffee and observed the wet carnage inflicted by slugs. She observed all the holes eaten in leaves by unseen creatures. She parted rotted stems sword-crossed in the soggy overgrowth and found a yellow flower just bloomed.

Marsha tried to clear a path. This yellow flower needed the sun, the sun that had had so little to do with the earth and her garden these last few weeks.

Morning work traffic had started beyond the hedges. In the trees she heard birds, blues and browns. A bumble bee zoomed in and hugged a stem nearby with the sun on its eyes.

Marsha’s new man leaned over. “What is that thing? It appears somewhat bedraggled.”

“Help me hold these open. Let’s get some sun in here,” Marsha told him. This new man, who had longer arms, reached in and parted the shambles with the backs of his hands and the surface of his arms.

The new man, on his knees, his arms wide like a sunning flamingo, the little yellow flower exposed to the sun, said, “That’s hits it right on. We should keep these open with some sticks.”

Marsha stood and went to the porch, where she’d left her coffee. She sat in the sun. She sipped her coffee, which was hot and creamy and tasted just right. She watched the new man and waited. She wanted to see just what kind of man this new man was.

Milo was a friendly man but he had a laugh like a slug dropped in an acid bath. If you heat the oil too much and watch as the garlic blackens soon after putting it in, Milo’s laugh is like that. Milo was tall, thin, and his fingers were long. On the subject of Milo’s laugh, one of his friends said, “You sound like you’re being torn in half.”

“But it was a funny joke,” Milo would say in his pleasant way after completing his laugh.

Milo was well liked. He worked hard. But he had difficulty with intimate relationships.

“It’s your laugh,” his friends told him. “Not your chuckle, but the big one.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Milo asked. “What’s the matter with you guys. When I hear or see something funny, I laugh.”

Milo’s laugh became the joke for comedians at clubs. “What the hell just happened out there?” a comedian said. “Who out there just vomited up a bag of jacks?” At the matinee, George, one of Milo’s friends, nudged his shoulder with an elbow. “Dude, you’re freakin me out.”

“That was so funny,” Milo said.

When Milo wasn’t laughing he was calm and steady. His face displayed little emotion or reaction, which explained why people liked Milo. He would listen and nod his head. He would ask a question and people would say, “I hadn’t thought of asking that.” At items of minimal humor, he would simply chuckle in a bearable way.

At a party one Friday, Bernand introduced his friends to a woman named Beatrice. George, Harold, Tito, and Milo crowded around and each in turn was introduced to Beatrice. But when Beatrice opened her mouth to say “Hi. Please to meet you” to Milo she showed them all a dark green snag of spinach in between two otherwise normal front teeth.

“Did you see everyone turn? Shit,” Tito said.

“And Beatrice. She was humiliated and I was humiliated,” Bernard said. “Jesus, Milo. You always do this.”

“She was so pretty that the dirt in her teeth stood out and I found the combination just too funny,” Milo said. “I’m sorry.”

One day when Milo had just begun work for the Company, the boss had a sudden countenance of alarm. He ran into the room where the snack machines were kept. He saw Milo talking on the phone with his customary calm, just chatting away on his lunch break.

The boss shrugged. He ran back into the hall when he heard that sound, a high-pitched bitterness, a crescendo of childhood nightmares that filled the office like a fire alarm. But the boss only saw Milo, closing his phone, and turning to the coffee machine with a fresh bill.

“You lose all control when you laugh,” George said on their way to the movies. “And not only that, you laugh at inappropriate things.”

“It’s just the way I laugh. It doesn’t hurt anyone,” Milo said.

That’s when they saw the accident, just as George turned the corner. “Shit,” George said. They saw steam rising from crumpled front ends. George and Milo stopped and got out. “911,” Milo told George, “and hurry,” so cool-headed most of the time, always ready to lend aid.

A man and woman stumbled out of a car. From the other car came the sound of a crying toddler, the mother inside asking it if it were okay and reaching for the release buttons on the belt. George went to the mother with the child, Milo to the man and woman who’d sat on the curb. The man had a slash above his eye and the woman asked Milo if he had a tissue with which to dab the wound. Everyone seemed okay and already they could hear sirens in the distance.

Thats when Milo turned to see George, the mother and the child. The mother was red with terror and relief. George was carrying the child. Milo’s eyes went to the child’s face. The child’s lips, chin, and nose were spattered with what must have been yogurt, blueberry yogurt, and there was one perfect little blueberry pasted close to the child’s left nostril, so that when he breathed in his current state of subsiding shock, the blueberry rolled a little distance down his upper lip, then was snatched back up when the child sniffed.

When the police arrived they found everyone laughing. Some of them were bleeding and steam was still rising from broken radiators but all of them were laughing, dabbing each other with tissues, wiping at tears, and laughing, even the child, and the tallest of them, Milo, shook with the ugliest and bitterest laughter of all.

“Hey, someone could’ve been killed here,” one of the officers said.

“That’s exactly right,” Charles said with difficulty. “That’s exactly right.”

The dope smoker visited Computer Leon in his basement. He said, “I saw a school bus speeding by this morning. There were two kids on the roof. They had butterfly nets.”

“The hell you say,” Computer Leon said.

“It’s true,” the dope smoker said.

“Maybe you were high,” Computer Leon suggested.

“Well, I was. But still.”

Computer Leon, to be rid of him, built the dope smoker an app for his phone, which reeked of dope. “This app,” Computer Leon said, “will tell you exactly what’s happening on all school buses in town. It will tell you when they pick up, when they drop off, when they depart and when they arrive back at their yards, the names of the driver, even weather alerts. I just published it for everyone to use.”

“It’s a fine app,” the dope smoker said, visiting again next day. “But it says we’re related. Look.”

Computer Leon snatched the phone away from the dope smoker. “What the hell is this?” He pulled the data into the screen again and he got lists and lists of information about the town’s school buses. Edmund handing in his keys; two bozos flipping off commuters at the rear; a leaky brake line; a child waving to her mother; Leon related to dope smoker.”

“You?” he asked his wife at dinner. “Maybe in your line but not mine.”

“It’s your app,” his wife said. “The strangest we have is a Civil War general.”

Leon drilled into his lines of code, nothing of them at all about fetching or relating genealogy data. He thought he caught the error, a dubious set of variables eying each other line 15 to line 17 like nervous gerbils. He cut them out, compiled, and ran the software again on his own phone, which returned a new list: “Johnny Southerland on the 218 route; little Jimmy Williams refused his greens but did okay on his rabbit essay; Marcos Jr still asleep in the yard, Bus 29, forgotten; Leon related to dope smoker.”

“Everlasting hell,” Leon said.

He enlisted Dan the Computer Man and Computer Geek Woman, competitors in the local trade. They tapped at their keyboards; they printed out and underlined; they compiled and recompiled. The latest of two returns said, “Lilly Pond School closed for mold infestation; Mayor trolling for porn; little Jimmy Williams pouring gin into his cup, parents dozing; Leon related to dope smoker and to Janie Bartholomew Battle, aka Computer Geek Woman.”

“It’s insane. It says you’re my long lost brother,” Computer Geek Woman said.

“Bartholomew Battle?” Computer Leon said.

“Mine says I’m related to Jane at the post office and to the Dalai Lama,” Dan the Computer Man said. “You’ve erected the devil in this thing, Leon.”

“I just got a call from some bloke in India named Achyut,” Leon’s wife called down into the basement. “He said we’re distant but near enough.”

The calls started thick next morning. “This app you published is telling me I’m related to some stalker in Billings.” “The app says you’re my uncle.” “It told me the bus would be late and that I’m related to that scary politician who’s always on the news.” The calls kept coming. Computer Leon was on the phone all morning catching up with relatives in Iran and his wife had lunch with “the Twins.”

“Those Twins were a hilarity, but thanks to you I have more nieces to buy for at Christmas,” his wife said, “and, by the way, we’re off to Scotland for a reunion in March.”

“The hell we are,” Computer Leon said, pecking at screen nuance, logic scrambling like ants disturbed. “This app is devil’s brew, a lying bag of crack.”

The dope smoker visited that evening. “Since we’re cousins, I’d thought I’d invite myself to dinner.”

“Why don’t you go smoke some leaf, on another continent, preferably,” Leon said, slamming the door.

That night Computer Leon dreamed of yellow buses, yellow buses filled with distant kin, all bearing gifts and photo albums. Two children rode on the roof of a bus and swatted at butterflies with nets. There were great lines of buses, yellow buses groaning down the mountains, crowds of brothers and sisters, second aunts and uncles. Some of them had six fingers to a hand. Others disinfected their teeth with hair brushes and cat litter. They all called from the windows, affecting sympathy for Leon, who stood by with a little flag in his hand, which he rotated with the enthusiasm of a ten year old laptop.

A public meeting was called. Scientists sat at the table with examinations, studies, and open applications on their phones. One of them spoke into the microphone. He said, “Through no fault of his own, Leon has proven that we’re all related. In this room, my family sits, many of you already know this. But we shouldn’t fear these insights. It proves something. This knowledge will encourage world peace.”

Someone yelled from the crowd, “If I’m related to you then I’m a fried onion.” Another, “There’s no way in hell I’m related to that fat bastard over there.” And, “And me, are you all claiming my wife is my mother’s sister’s daughter?” And finally, “The divorce rate’s risen four fold in the last week. We’re overwhelmed with the paper work.”

Computer Leon, his wife, Dan the Computer Man, and Computer Geek Woman snuck out the back. They met up at the diner and ordered burgers. The waitress kept shaking her head at Dan. Computer Leon checked his phone. The others waited, watching him. “Says here the buses have all stopped running and the mayor’s licking his lips in his office. It says here that everyone hates me. But check it out,” Computer Leon said, showing them the screen, “I’m top of the list for most downloaded app. I’ve got some big checks coming.”

“What do you think that dope smoker likes for dinner,” Leon’s wife said. “He’s family after all.”

“Forget it,” Computer Leon said. “There’s no way in hell he’s eating at my table.”

It was an odd storm. She watched it from the picture window in her hotel room. She saw four small figures crossing the flat desert field, the storm giving chase behind them, blue and black with rage.

They were three men and a boy. From what she could tell, they were oldest to youngest, which might have made them three generations running.

A lightning stripe crossed above them, emerging from the air like a hot white note. The thunder smacked against the glass and her forehead and she turned from the rattle of the window.

She turned back with a ring in her ears. One of her wrists hurt. She squinted out to see. It appeared that the boy had fallen. One of the younger men ran back to give assistance. The boy appeared to be weeping, but they were still quite a distance from the road and the hotel, and what were they doing in the field anyway, a boy, two young men, and an old man?

In the dining hall at lunch, people whispered to the rumor of storm, as if it were a loved one who’d escaped prison. Tornado, someone threatened. She was on her way to her son’s place in the south. She’d stopped here for the night. She was no stranger to weather. Once she’d seen a cow snatched from its breakfast as if it were not a cow at all. She remembered before it disappeared how it had one eye closed against horizontal hail.

The bearded sky, the deep gray canvas, so close now, the hotel trembling. Maybe it was ink in the distance coming or black sand on the wind. The men raced for the road, the boy now limping, all of them heedless of low bush and brittle grass. It was hard to tell whether the boy was weeping or singing.

The old man began to lumber, so it seemed to her. The younger men ran. But they moved with hesitation; they had their shoulders turned and as they progressed they beckoned to the old man and the boy. A series of lightning strikes ripped at their hair and shoulders; the four people stopped and crouched. That’s when she saw the van, a Border Patrol van, at the side of the road.

She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Another boost of thunder rolled off the desert, like a great solid ball. She stepped away from the window. She felt a shudder in the floor.

The young men made it out; they came up a rise to the roadside. The border patrol officers entered the rainless wind, opened the back doors, and pulled the men into the van, who gave their arms up with little resistance. The old man was next. An officer went for him. The old man stopped and put his palms on his knees to catch his breath. He raised a hand to the officer as if to say wait, just a little rest please.

Three forks of lightning lit the sky simultaneously, one near, one far, and another still farther, the most distant light tucked back in the clouds so that its light sheeted horizontally then withdrew.

The officer assisted the old man into the van. He slammed the doors shut and ran to the passenger door and leapt in and the van eased onto the road and disappeared outside of view. Big drops of rain shattered against the window. The sudden rain snapped something.

She rushed down the hall and took the elevator to the first floor. As she flew past the front desk, a young man said, “There’s a tornado watch, senora. Everyone’s going down to the basement floor.” The auto door swooshed aside. She walked quickly to the side of the building. The rain’s weight on her shoulders reminded her of aggressive cats. She crossed the road with a hand up to protect her eyes and went to the edge of the field where the van had waited, the field with its leaning grass and thrashing branches, thunder crushed.

The ground out there had turned red. The bodies of the bushes shook. The yucca spears were amazingly still. Thunder knocked across the road.

She heard someone call. She turned. A man was standing just behind the yellow median stripe. He was protecting his head with a magazine.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. “There might be a tornado. What are you doing?”

She opened her mouth to explain. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”

I was sitting on my back porch thinking about Henry when Leroy came with his dog and his son.

“I was thinking about Henry,” I said.

“Henry? I haven’t thought of him in years. We should be close enough now.”

We decided then that we should finish things. Leroy’s son wept when he told him it would just be Leroy and I.

“You should take plenty to keep you warm. If you remember, it gets very cold,” Leroy’s wife said.

Leroy laughed. “Henry knows cold. He’s been waiting in it, at least we hope, because it’s about the prolonged ending; it’s about knowing what’s coming but not when it’s coming.”

“Don’t make jokes about the cold, Leroy, or Henry. Your son would dislike making the same trip, if he knew what it was all about. Years from now. Imagine it.”

“Well,” Leroy said. “If that happened, I’d like him to consider it. I wouldn’t want him to forget.”

We drove up the mountain in silence. For some time I regretted bring any of it up, Henry and endings, what we now had to do. “I know what you’re thinking,” Leroy said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re thinking man I shouldn’t have even brought Henry up. When you did, it all hit me again, the time it’s been. How we’ve neglected but how we also used that neglect in a selfish way. How he’s probably persisted. I remember when he told me he never did like you.”

I laughed. “He could never quite get past his losses. He felt that superhuman distance might change things. You remember. He felt that the sky would mitigate. It’s like going to another country and trying everything again.”

Two hours into the country, I checked the GPS and we stepped down a hill through thin, close-growing pines and came to the river bed and the smooth slabs of stone where it had all began and where it would all end. At our backs was the tree slope. The sky broadened out to the west so that we soon saw across this great space the Milky Way emerge and chain horizon edge to horizon edge like a memory of swan wings and church echo.

“This is it,” Leroy said. “We should set it up here.”

We unzipped the bigger pack and erected the knuckled tripod and positioned the transmitting equipment where Henry was posited as more than just light year but color, buffer, frequency, and segmentation, then we waited.

Midnight came cold but windless. From our position, we saw a mother and her fawns graze by. Something massive that breathed rapidly retreated into the bush on the other side of the river when Leroy employed his lighter and passed me a cigarette.

Come 2 AM or so, the screen shimmered and something slender, like a thin arm, progressed across it.

“Say, We forgot,” Leroy said. I did, typing.

“Say now, We’re here to finish things,” Leroy said.

The screen went black. Thirty minutes later the thin arm returned that signified locomotion in the sky, Henry passing behind and then emerging from what might have been a planet or a star cluster or something beautiful and binary.

“Say, Black Queen to d4. Then say, classic mate.”

I worked in the information, with some amount of thrill and sadness, and transmitted. The screen went black again.

“That should end it and in a few months or years, depending, he’ll understand,” Leroy said, laying back. “I’ve had that move ready for the last few days. I wonder what his eyes will tell him when he finally receives.”

“I know,” I said. “I know he’d seen it. I know he’d been waiting with his fingers crossed. But I also wonder if he’s beaten that rash, if he’s even out there at all.”

Leroy visited years later with another dog, his son grown now and on his own journey, and we sat on the lawn with beers, and Leroy confided, “I still think of him, you know. That was a killer, classic mate. But since that night, all I feel is empty.”

“You said the rain would stop,” she said.

“Is that a driveway or just another turn?” he asked.

“You said it would stop,” she said.

He moved onto the shoulder slowly. He looked at her. “I did but it hasn’t has it.”

She watched out the window. He pulled onto the road.

“She said it would be on the left,” he said.

“But going up or going down?” she said. “We don’t know which direction.”

The wipers sliced through the water on the window. The leaves above the road looked like foil shapes in a blender, like love poetry assembled by knives.

“It’s not stopping,” she said. “You said it would stop.”

“Yes, I said it would stop,” he said. “Just call and tell her we’re going to be late.”

She looked at him. “Very late. I don’t know if we’re going up or going down.”

I could tell a story about the end of the world. When Ed came into the store with a sneezing pig and a chicken with a blue sock on its head.

“You can’t bring those in here,” I told him. “Jesus, Ed.”

“You haven’t been outside,” Ed said. “The sun’s melting everyone’s shoes.”

He gave permission for Harry to slip into the storage room and lift a bottle of whiskey, one of the finer brands not intended for drinking, “least not by my crowd,” he said.

Harry snuck up to his room and hid the bottle under his bed then slept through the night.

His mother asked him why he was leaving so early. “To play,” he said.

“This early?”

He fished around in the alley cans and a dumpster and found a small box and used packing. He put these at the foot of his bed and hoped she wouldn’t ask. At the door, she look wrung and tired.

She said, “What were you doing with whiskey?” Tell me, you. Tell me.”

“I found it,” he said. “I just found it.”

He climbed out the window. He fished the bottle out of the midnight trash. He ducked when the curtains moved and his mother looked out. He brought his hand up to the place where his jaw still hurt and for reason he thought about purple mushrooms.

This time he hid the bottle behind the book case. When he knew she was at work, he put the bottle in the box and carefully wrote out the address. He found tape in the kitchen drawer, stamps in the desk. He didn’t know the postage so he pasted all the little squares on the right side and hoped.

The next few days his mother gave him curtness and dishes to wash but he could tell she felt sorry. He didn’t want her to feel sorry. He’d listen through the door. “He can’t come out,” he heard her tell friends. “Maybe in a few days,” he heard.

On Saturday, she gave him a letter, which she’d already opened. She watched him unfold it. “Thank you,” it said. It said nothing else and there was no return.

“What does it mean?” his mother said. “Tell me what it means.”