Terra cotta suns with vacant eyes came ghoulishly to life in the
flood of the motion-sensitive carport lights as Ruben passed slowly
by. They smiled fatuously at him from their place on the wall. He smiled back and slowly followed the tremulous dance of his flashlight toward the next house. Nearly every house on his block had one or two of the decorative faces, posted by the front door or in the carport; not so much as sentries, but as talismans applying constant invocations like the prayer wheels of a Buddhist shrine — as if three hundred and twenty some days of sunshine were not enough. The next house had no lights on, automatic or otherwise. He turned his flashlight to the darkened entry; there they were, three small ones, impishly beaming in the shadows.

The leaf shimmered in the afternoon light. Wade watched it quivering
on his gilder’s tip, held there as if by magic. Clearly, it wanted to float
away, even disintegrate into oblivion rather than be stuck to a frame for
a few centuries. The gilder’s tip — nothing more than a few hairs sandwiched
between cardboard — would not release it. The slightest
breeze
might have broken the spell, but of course, the room was dead still, for
this was the time of enchantment. This was the moment (apart from
that other moment, when he received the check) that made it all worth
while. Finally the hours of work paid off, now, after selecting
the wood,
after milling it, joining it, sanding it, perhaps carving it, living with the
stench of hot rabbit skin glue, mixing it with gesso, applying one, two,
sometimes eight coats; then the bole (3 parts glue, one part clay), one,
two, three coats, and between each coat the endless sanding, 200, 400,
600 grit, smoother than you can feel; not smooth enough, sand it some
more; finally it was ready.
Wade dipped his brush in the gilder’s liquor (7 parts water, 3
parts alcohol), swabbed an area as big as the leaf, and gently laid the
leaf on the frame. The adhesive powers of the moistened bole were far
superior to the static cling of the guilder’s tip. Wade slipped the tip out
from under the leaf, and gently smoothed it out. Then he magically
took another from the book, dipped his brush again into the clear potion,
and slowly but surely turned the wood to gold.
He tried not to think of the time, though he felt

...her whole heart just beaming out of her face, you know, eyes a little moist, and unable to speak. I knew right off what she was feeling, don’t ask me how, but I could tell she was feeling the way I used to feel sometimes when I was up in the Salmon River Mountains and nobody around and everything peaceful and the smell so clean and fresh and all at once your head gets full of knowing things like you’re as much a part of what’s up there as the sky and the wind and the trees, and what it’s like to be a salmon in the river and that there’s nothing to fear in dying and the word itself has a ridiculous
sound in your head because how can the sky die. I could see Connie was there, in the mountains or the sky or both, and I knew from having been there that the worst thing I could do would be to talk to her, or ask her to tell me what was going on in her head, because you can’t explain it to someone who hasn’t been there, and if you try, it means the person you’re talking to is a whole separate thing from you, and that pulls you away from knowing things back into the regular world where no one knows anything. So I just smiled back at her, which wasn’t hard because the kind of beam she was beaming is worse than a yawn for being contagious, and I rocked the baby, and she held my hand, and slowly came back to normal thinking, which is always a little sad, but you know it never lasts, don’t ask me why. She said she told Peter what she told me; how she’d been staring at the circle, and pretty soon she could see the wall behind the circle, and then
she could see outside the wall, and she could see the whole city, and the whole desert all around, and the whole big valley, and the whole continent, and the whole planet, but she could still see the desert and the city and the wall and the circle and she could hear every sound and it was like she was everything and everyone else just as much as she was
herself, and I said ‘I know’, and I smiled and rocked the baby.