The night came in wet droves. I slipped out of the house to walk barefoot in its fingers. “Moonlight is good for the feet,” my slenderest aunt had always said.

Then I noticed that each blade of grass was a recluse. Pushed up against each other, snaking around each other, they were tortured hermits. Forced to be together against their innermost nature.

I began pulling up clumps of wet grass. Throwing them, liberating them. It was like laying monks on their backs in small boats barely larger than their bodies, one monk per boat, and pushing them onto the night sea.

But there were so many tortured souls that I soon gave up. I walked on their bodies saying nothing then, what a rat, going deeper into the night. I thought of the monks drifting further apart on the dark sea, looking up at the stars from their wandering beds. When they would finally look over their gunwale they might see a whale spouting lazily with a piglike sound. But no monks. No monks at last.