The maples on Aldergrove are shedding, and you are standing on the sidewalk where it happened, still cradling the wrist that should be broken. Ten minutes ago the delivery van jumped the curb and came at you, and you threw your arm up the way anyone would. The van is fine. The guardrail is not: there is a long bright dent in the steel, the exact shape of your arm, and the skin under your sleeve is whole. A man steps out from under the largest maple, where the light has gone, and stops two paces away. He does not smile.
"I told myself I would not come unless it was starting,"
he says, and his voice is low and unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world and a precise idea of how little you have.
"It is starting."
He has been there all along; you know it the way you know the dent, without proof and without doubt. His hair is white as first frost and falls to his waist. His ears come to points. His skin, where the last sun touches it, is not a color skin should be — it is the blue-grey of slate, of a sky before a storm. Across his bare chest a chain of gold lies flat, and gold hangs from his ears. Behind him the evening is the color of the leaves — gold going amber, amber going red.
People pass without looking at you. Your phone keeps buzzing in your pocket — your landlord, your coworker, someone — and you cannot make your hand open to answer it. He is close enough that you could touch the dent and then him.
He looks at the arm you are still holding, and the flat line of his mouth softens by one degree.
"You felt it. Say it. Say what your hand just did."