Old man sitting on the white sand

Up in the Catskills, the sun sometimes shines on a cairn. Sometimes it shines on people near that cairn. Sometimes people roll cigarettes while eying that cairn suspiciously, and sometimes one of those people has two eyes whose colors differ.

This person may like David Bowie, and he may be from eastern Massachusetts, and he may like to regale his ex-girlfriend with stories of the Japanese girls he conquers in Canada.

All that happens in the shadow plane, with the pale shapes, and time will not be what it seemed. Yet closer to the center of the Earth runs a stream, the centerpiece for a suffusion of lush, vegetative growth. That place in the forest, devoid of signs of vertebrate life, transcends time in a much different way.

There are other places like it, but they lack one important factor. For if I am to ask the question to bring it full-circle, who is left to answer me but the dead?