Summer rotted as summer always did, then shriveled into fall’s mummifications. Winter was sterile as moondust and had very little to do with blood and breath. Then spring came, or something like spring, and death walked the hills again. Mostly he watched it from his bedroom window. On his braver days he wandered out into the brunt of it to try to find an answer. Yesterday had been a braver day. He’d pulled on his rubber boots, slipped his lucky stone into his jacket pocket, and knocked three times on the porch railing, once for the past, once for the future, once for making it back again. Then he’d rubbed his teeth against one another and plunged into the wild, bloody field where robins ripped worms from the earth and late…