To my father, who sang to me.

Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed.

Step-and-a-Half hummed in her sleep and sank deeper into her own tune, a junker's pile of tattered courting verse and hunter's wisdom and the utterances of itinerants or words that sprang from a bit of grass and scrap of cloud or a prophetic pig's knuckle, in a world where butchers sing like angels.