The sun-bleached cornfield stretches toward the horizon, and
where yellow melts into blue, there is a thin lack line.  I am the
third car to arrive on the scene of a two-car collision where a man,
his forehead pressed to the top of the steering wheel of his truck, is
dead.  The buck he carried is wilted in the field; its antlers, a small
tree.  And a woman lies on her side in the middle of the road.  Her
child, strapped in a car seat, sits beside her, chewing on a set of
pink plastic keys.  "A pen?  A piece of paper?" a man in a business
suit asks.  I am carrying a purse.  He wants to get the woman's
name.  Maybe a phone number.  He says she is dying, but other
than his words, there is no sound.  Everything is still.  Across the
highway there's a boarded up church where the sign reads,
"Conscience is a beeper from God," and, father down, a small
cemetery, a collapsing barn, a fallen grain elevator, and then nothing
from here to Selmore.  It's Spring.  This morning while I walked around 
the downtown street, I saw a man in a yellow construction
hat rise out of a manhole like a flower blooming in a time-lapsed
speed.  Behind him stood a lilac bush, a Japanese cherry tree, and in
the evening, I watched the news; the woman--thirty-two, mother of
three--died from massive trauma to her head.  Her mother and
husband arrived while they lifted her into the ambulance, and still,
as her veiled body disappeared, there was furious calm, everything
white, everything silent.  Then a light breeze.  The broken cornstalks
shivered and shook as the ambulance moved down the empty
highway, fading until it was no larger than the black birds flying
overhead, until like everything else in the distance, it became part of
the blurred horizon.