In our house there are twenty-seven rooms. In those twenty-seven rooms tick seven hundred and twenty-nine clocks. My father says I should come visit, it’s been so long. For days, traveling up and down mountain trails, I get mauled by thistles and thorns, watch great fires as they ravage plains. I sleep among ruins thick with weeds and black bugs with red dots, fat clouds lumbering across the sky. A blind man in rags tells me he is six hundred years old and asks for the way to Bosnia, where he came from all those years ago, he tells me, but cannot seem to find his way back. He doesn’t even know how he came to be so old. I cross a black wood, barren but for a blossom of children hanging by their ankles from charred limbs of trees, a dozen in each crown, alive, newborn, plump arms dangling toward me, but I have to push ahead. My father is waiting.
I come within sight of the house. Grainy dusk falls down the slope of hill. By the time I come to the river at the bottom it is night. I do not know how to pass to the other side. A dog barks somewhere. It is so dark I cannot see my feet.
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