take-out He wheeled the curve through a slush of rutted road to three distinct slices of light, each warm square with its own glow of tilting amber, the familiar frame of house with heavy limbs scratching at its roof. Her candles through the window, he remembered how she burned them endlessly. Drunken prawn with oyster sauce and fortune condoms leaned into the last hard pull to the right, collective passengers en route. Headlights dimmed below the metal hood, thumping of stray raindrops from oaks overhead. A footpath led the way to her gate, to a sisal mat signed in chi or feng shui or something he may have heard her say about the wind or water, get a grip he had thought. Her own thoughts shoved like pent-up Brahmans behind a cattle guard, pushing past all-or-nothing now across her startled lips, streaming through the crack of light born from her opened door. It was nothing nothing but a pencil line a thin scant thread beside the white space looming since their last good-bye. Her words poured like liquid prayer beads in plastic wash pails to the ground to his shoes with no regret dissolving in their overlay of mud and leaves. What he missed, she heard. What he couldn't understand, she learned and knew by rote. She watched him go. She tried to hear the ocean and imagined what dull stone he'd choose to scrape the mud, the leaves, the sludge. Mia Moore