He reached out to her; she stepped into his arms. His hands slid lightly up her back, craddled her shoulders. She felt contained in his embrace, never confined.

“It's late in the autumn,” she said. “Getting on toward winter.”

“Time to harrow, perhaps,” said Jakt. “Or perhaps it's already time to kindle up the fire and keep the old hut warm before the snow comes.”

He kissed her and it felt like the first time.

“If you asked me to marry you all over again today, I'd say yes,” said Valentine.

“And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.”

They had said the same words many, many times before. Yet they still smiled to hear them, because they were still true.

One fall I gutted a bee tree that a neighbor felled. I took a chain saw and ripped into this toppled old tupelo. The poor tree was cancerous with bee comb. The further I cut into the belly of the tree, the more bees I found. The insects filled a cavity as large as I was. It was a gray, cool autumn day and all the bees were home, now agitated by the surgery. I finally plunged my hand into the mess of comb. Hot! Ninety-five degrees at least. Overcrowded with 100,000 cold-blooded bees, the hive had become a warm-blooded organism. The heated honey ran like thin, warm blood. My gut felt like I had reached my hand into a dying animal.

At what does the watermelon laugh,
when it is being murdered?