After our preparations were finished, Thomas and I sat at a table beside her as she lay bound on the bench with her feet to the fireplace. I remember we ate potatoes mashed with buttermilk in the first quiet the room had seen for days. Thomas offered me a drink of home brew and I took it, wanting to screen out the spectacle he and I had created. It was the same drink I suspected my grandmother had imbibed when Thomas was out tending sheep. I tasted the gorse flower and nettle tops at the front of my mouth, and with the remaining mouthfuls, felt the slow closing of a valve in my awareness. The candles around my grandmother began to throw sparks and sudden beams. Thomas took out the playing cards and we had a game of pinochle. After counting melds and tricks, I was declared the winner. The candle wax started to sputter. He said we should take turns reading loudly over her.

"I call to remembrance my song: and in the night I commune with mine own heart, and search out my spirits."

"Louder than that," Thomas hacked at me through his cigarette smoke. "You’ll frighten nothin’ with such restraint."

I tried to read louder, but was afraid of the way the words reverberated from the wall, the way the candles seemed to waver with each word I spoke. When I fell silent, Thomas stood up and left the house. I wanted to rush out after him–the door hadn’t caught the latch and was snagged by the wind, neither closing nor slamming back against the frame, but was strangely suspended by a gust. I played with my bangs. My stomach was tight. The hot taste of alcohol hung on my breath.

Something hard struck the house. I held myself. The sound of footsteps on the roof came as echoes into the bowl of the room. They stopped near the chimney. Something ticked gently down its sides, dislodging soot. A moment later, a horseshoe swung back and forth in the hearth. From where I was standing behind the body, it resembled the broken pendulum of a clock. There was a beating in my ears. It pulsed as if hands were being cupped on and off my head, and it happened every time I looked around the room and saw wax running along the bench and my grandmother sealed in her dark weave.

A hollow voice came from above the floating horseshoe, "Take the rope, Maygun."

To grasp it, I would have had to walk around the corpse. The two of us were frozen there, and I couldn’t move until she did. She lay horizontally above the earth, while I was still grounded to it by the soles of my feet. It took me a moment to notice that Thomas was back in the house blowing into the clench of his hands. As he brushed past my grandmother to get to the fireplace, he patted my shoulder. Then he unfastened the rope that was attached to the horseshoe and trailed it out of the chimney. Beginning by hooking it around my grandmother’s legs, he circled her in many passes, each time yanking more rope out of the chimney.