One by one, the boys and girls of the safety patrol donned their winter coats, knit hats, scarves and gloves and, on top of these, they fastened their safety patrol belts, unfurled their plastic flags from the cardboard box in the corner of the classroom and marched out of the portable ready to assume their posts.

There was a fine emulsion of dust in the air, exposed by the light of the noisy projector, and each mote and particle flitted like an excited atom finally making use of its potential energy, dead pieces of skin brought back to life again and under renewed attention through this magical lamplight, this curious arc of illumination cast from the projector.

Then they sealed their gloves shut with a baseball inside each pocket like a pearl, wound the leather bivalves closed with thick rubber bands and positioned them under their mattresses for the rest of the night.

She leaned forward with her palms supporting both of her jowls, lulled by the soft hum of her new Selectric into a trance-like state where, once she had removed her glasses—and she always wrote with them off, temple covers hooked through ringlets to a nylon cord that hung loosely around her neck—she then looked down at her cleavage which suddenly appeared magnified and she could finally, in a boost of exhilaration that perhaps bordered on self-admiration, face the quiet tyranny of each cream colored page.

Each of these weekends was a kind of vacation, one that even as it was getting underway, seemed to fill Heath with a quiet kind of dread for he knew how quickly the time would pass, how soon he would be forced to assume the old routines.

It took a while for their eyes to adjust as they squinted at the horizon and stumbled in the overgrowth toward the garden hose for the quick restoration of a cool drink of water, hoping it would re-establish their sense of equilibrium, put some distance between them, the way Heath felt as he recounted with embarrassment whatever small intimacies they’d managed inside that shed; the sort of things they both understood, even then, could never be replicated—much less attempted—in the full cast of daylight.

Flipping through each stiff page of the old photo album, the cellophane page preservers occasionally rattled loose from the yellowed gum backing that had held them in place and Heath marveled at the faded Instamatic prints, shaking his head in disbelief that they had ever been that young.

It was a new sort of laugh, self-censorious and fraught with a tinge of implacable sadness; something that had slowly surfaced over the years, until it had all but usurped the upper registers of her formerly high spirited and carefree guffaw, that bawdy and vital laughter of her youth.

And so, after six or so months of making one another miserable, they were married.

Few people every really want to pore through the ashes, afraid they’ll get their hands dirty; it’s irrational, probably, to read into such things too deeply, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when lightning flashed, everything afterward inexorably changed.