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27 Under the Fingernail Moon I went into town for a paper mainly, but wound up doing some other stuff. I fed money to the bank in an envelope. I fed three quarters to the box at the carwash. The nozzle bucked and jumped like a gun with a mind of its own. When I was finished, cold circles sagged on my ankles. Then I drove out on the road in my clean pickup. The sun had just gone down. The sky was red, and yellow over the red, and the color of a bruise over that, with a yellow fingernail of moon in the bruise-color. The blacktop ran under the moon like a river, and the trees along it closed in the distance like dark river-banks or a furrow, the plowsheared shanks of a furrow in the black dirt of the Delta I come from. A big shiny brand-new car went around me suddenly like some kind of animal bolting from cover. It was frosted and scribbled all over, written in soap. “Watch Texas grow,” it said. They had their little inside light on, like a dream, or a cartoon. The prince and princess on their honeymoon. Then they were gone, on under the moon, into a life I have lost the power to imagine—golf, though, I think, and satellite contracts. Mist was rising, that blue that drains the clean edges from the fields 28 and drains their green and swallows the lights of distant watertowers, turning them strange as stars shrouded in hydrogen. I saw one once, like The War of the Worlds, like a robot angel, striding in fog at the edge of the sunset, and the fog rolling with ochre and cream and rose, and I thought, Those are the battlements of heaven, those are the gates of dream, and my chest and throat hurt. ...

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