She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light in the old man's dirt yard, the flaky gray earth scribed with the game she'd been playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis. There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said, and he'd be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page with a corner on it, he got 'em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he'd get a little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page. She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded away, but he'd never let her work it. Sometimes he'd read out loud, a kind of hesitation in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn't picked up in a long time. They weren't stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it, probably didn't understand it himself, maybe nobody did...