nervous system (fight-or-flight) is wholly engaged.

“We should hurry,” I say to her.

She is still leaning over Jericho, tugging at scruffs of red mane, his panting accelerating, tongue dripping onto her sandals. She nods, but I can see she’s calm. Her being home is likely having the opposite effect on her. Her body is telling her rest, digest. 

“Oh cool,” she says, noticing the demijohn. “He made wine this fall.”

She opens a cabinet, carefully selects a Disney mug, and fills it with wine. She glugs. “Hoo!” She coughs and raises her eyebrows. “It’s way strong.”

She offers it to me, and I carry it, following her to the basement.

Months ago, when she glimpsed my cross country trophies on display in my house and said that she didn’t have any of those sentimentally-charged childhood items because they are all in boxes in her father’s basement, I suggested: “Well, we should fucking steal ‘em back.” I didn’t expect to be taken so literally.

II

The Vocabula Mahakuassica is the extant volume of words and phrases comprising the extinct Susquehannock language. It is a diminutive lexicon compiled by Swedish missionary John Campanius in the 1640s. Of the scant 89 words and phrases recorded, the preserved language alternates between utilitarian bartering and conviviality.