Consciousness convolves the past and present and the ache and the dread of the future, a longing, a remembering, a surrender in three parts; and time is the viscous skein of a spider’s web spun, connected to itself, overlapping, patterned, not a thread but a spiral adhering the forward and backwards and the slipping of the center of indifference, the balance point of consciousness. How much of our past occupies our present, and how much of our future presupposes itself? We think in three times, but only exist in one, and then only for a moment between memory and dream.

I stepped out of the house through the back door and onto the covered screened porch. My father and grandfather built the porch, added it onto the back when I was a little kid. I can’t remember them building it, maybe I was too little, but for some reason I remember my dad painting the inside with a roller. White paint and black floor. It’s never been repainted. In the summers my parents dragged the bed frames and mattresses from the kids’ rooms out there, and Tami and I would sleep on the porch at night. My dad called it the sleeping porch even when we weren’t sleeping out there, and all summer the wind would blow in off the ocean far out of sight over the Coastal Range. You could smell the salt in the air and feel its cool always flowing across you all night long. I’d wake up in the mornings under a white sheet with two barn cats on me, like little space heaters, purring and pouring their sleepiness into me. Those were sweet times, sleeping times through the cool early mornings when the skies glimmered pink and the Milky Way and moon disappeared and my parents made coffee and clinked breakfast dishes inside, and I could roll over again and again and fade into dreams.

I walked across the yard between the farmhouse and the barn, the day still bright and glaring even in the late afternoon. The yard, never landscaped, had always been hard dirt picked clean by chickens and packed by the traffic of tractors and pickups loading and unloading, the barn doors and the hayloft almost always open and active, a workspace, but now the yard, neglected and obscure, was covered in dry weeds and a blanket of star thistles that I kicked through and crushed glassy with my boots and stirred into dust. The air smelled of dust, the thin dust of summer, and of yellow pollen and of ash and smoke from the wildfires still burning, always burning now in summer. I walked past the fuel storage tank between the house and barn, white metal and elevated, probably still full of pink diesel anointed with red dye and tax-free. Under the tank sat a metal cabinet flaked of most of its paint and without doors. Inside, three red metal gas cans, five-gallon pots, looked rust-welded onto a shelf next to a one-gallon plastic can that was always filled with a mix of two-stroke oil for the chainsaw. The plastic can bloated round like a ball in the heat as the gas expanded and tried to escape, and I fought the urge to open it, hissing, and kept walking.

The two-story barn hung immense from the sky, black and stormy, an American gothic cathedral, tragic and resolute, the brackish gray color of memory. I stepped from the sun’s glare into its shadow. The façade was made from vertical unstained planks twelve inches wide, blackened with time, mossed and mildewed green and orange and scorched by the sun, the wood grain granular, dimensional with rivulets of hardwood expressed from the soft, like braille, direct and speaking its paths and ways. All was tacked with brown nails bent extruding into a post-and-beam timber frame that had tilted rakishly, stylishly forward leaning like a tipped fedora. Rusted, corrugated tin panels, rectangular, covered most of the roof, but some had freed themselves and hung diagonally. Others had blown off completely making the roof a quilted mural with natural skylights and openings for screech owls and the little Mexican free-tailed bats that wedged themselves under the rafters and dropped hollow beetles and scorpion shells on the dirt floor.

One either finds comfort in a satiate barn like this, settled on its stone foundation, or trepidation at its inevitable collapse, but these old barns were beautiful to me, beautiful like rusted barbed wire clinging to decayed wooden posts or the shimmer of iridescent heat that pools above furrowed fields, beautiful like the broken steam tractor with its great spiked cast iron wheels that had sunk into the earth, forgotten in the backfield. Heavy, the harsh and heat, the dry, the hurt and work, these were the relics of our efforts, diminishing; our ruins; the melancholy beauty of a California farm.

The barn door stuck on its rails as I pulled three times hard before it budged, grudging, and slid gaping open its rectangular shade. Inside was quiet. Light fell on the floor in places, illuminations, but mostly it was dark and still. The barn exhaled warm air still smelling of hay and old manure and raw wood and horse. They were earth smells, calm smells, the smell of quiet. A black widow spider skittered from its web in the upper corner of the doorframe, metallic in its precision; its body disappeared into a wedge of wood. I pushed my hand through its web thick as cotton candy and listened to the pop and crackle, felt the stickiness of its taut filament fragility. Then I looked into the heart of the barn.

Rows of stalls divided the space with wooden rails, shoulder high, and an open corridor ran down the center. No Quarter Horses or Cream Drafts, but the rails and posts of their stalls were chewed and worn and body-carved, burnished curved and glossy, and the dirt floor was still stamped with their hoof prints. Timber framing crawled up the walls patterned, hand-hewn timbers as thick as my waist, with mortise and tenon joints, collar tied, braced, and pegged.

The hayloft was above me, but it only extended a third of the way down the barn and then the space opened up. I walked inside, down the aisle deeper, kicking scattered hay from the dirt. Most of the hay was gone from the stalls, but some remained piled in the corners two feet deep and loose and spreading, and some scattered in drifts on the floor. Horse tack and plow harnesses hung from the walls along with old tools, shovels, a pitchfork, and old branding irons. A block and tackle swung lifeless without creaking from the loft, gallow-like, above my head. The loft ladder had fallen to the ground. I stepped from under the loft’s overhang and looked up at sunlight streaming through roof openings in a domed ceiling thirty feet high, sunlight chandeliers dripping crystal from arched windows of corrugated tin, the air luminous and vast and leaded in its glow and open. I held out my arms on either side to catch pooled light in the palms of my hands, and I walked down the aisle.

There was a small form in the opening of the farthest stall that broke my reverie. I thought it was a cat or a small dog, but as I walked closer I saw that it was a fawn, on its side, legs pointed to me. I had found fawns before, never in the barn, usually under fence lines in the fields. Their mothers hide them, too small to run from danger, while the mothers forage, and you can go right up to them, the fawns. They won’t run away. They stay still and won’t leave. It’s tragic to think of them getting eaten that way, lying still under the predator’s breath and teeth before the attack, the violent strike, trusting to their only defense. I’ve heard coyotes kill deer in the night, the crashing through the underbrush and the snarling and the strange soft call of the deer, silent until its death, a single held note, calling for what, I wonder.

I suppose you could touch one, a fawn hiding like that, but I never had. I stood over this one, staring down at it, this one hiding here in the barn. I don’t know how she got in. She was perfect; her fur was soft tan brown with white spots on her back and sides, and white stripes down her neck. She had white-tipped ears and a white tummy and a black nose and muzzle and tiny black hooves on her spindly legs; fragile and beautiful, she was perfect. Her eyes had been eaten, her sockets bare and empty pockets of black like inverse prunes, her obsidian marble eyes gone. A gnat flew out of a socket. The eyes are always eaten first, before the flesh. I don’t know why. And I didn’t know what had eaten her eyes. A possum, maybe. Mice or birds. Outside, turkey vultures would’ve been on her. What else could get in here? Raccoons. I didn’t know what killed her, either. Maybe she starved, separated from her mother. The mothers get hit by cars sometimes or killed by coyotes.

The body was still intact and fresh, no blood or wounds, no other insects or maggots. Her stomach was distended, starting to inflate in death. I had the urge to pierce her and relieve the pressure, like with a sharpened stick, some prehistoric urge, spear her, but the air would be noxious, and it wouldn’t help her, wouldn’t help anything. I squatted down close to her, my feet almost touching her head, and just looked at her.

There is something pre-rational and ancient about close proximity to death, even the death of an animal like this fawn, the feeling, a warm empathy and the chill of loss. And the mystery. I remember shooting a bird with a pump BB gun as a kid, tired of bottles and cans, and running through my neighbor’s walnut orchard and the excitement of hitting a bird, a long shot, and watching it fall from the tree and finding it among the leaves, squatting down, still fluttering and standing and pumping and shooting it again, still fluttering, and distressed, pumping, barrel to its head and missing through its neck, and knowing that I done something horrible, and pumping that gun, because it was done with my hand, and that bird would never fly and was still alive shot three times through and pink and rubied and feathers messed. A life cut short, a story ended, damage that is irremediable. The finality of death in its reality is unlike anything else we experience. The absolute and the unknowable.

I talked to a man once who had lost his arm in a motorcycle accident. He said he sat up on the pavement after the collision and saw his severed arm ten feet away still in its leather sleeve, hand bare. He recognized himself there, and he said, ‘That’s my arm. I should keep that.’ I wonder if that’s what our ghosts say when they leave our bodies.

I looked at the fawn, that eyeless fawn, sacred and profane, laid out like an offering to a god, to me, and I wondered at the sacrifice. I reached out, and I touched her ear, held her velvet ear softly in my hand, and I pulled her, rolling her part way over to see if there was a wound on her other side, and as I pulled her gently towards me, softly the softness of her white-tipped ear, I uncovered a snake under her neck, a bull rattlesnake that rolled from its sleep over and in on itself, coiling exposed, dark and slow and agitated with white bellied dark and patterned diamond, and it flipped, and my whole body went cold as the snake figure-eighted rushing under my hand, infinite, and the hiss of its rattle, dead maracas, its tail lifted in the air like a blasphemous gesture. And I jumped, jumped from myself, an adrenaline bloodless jump; I dropped the fawn head, up and banged into the stall behind me, numb ringing in my ears, and I smashed and felt the wood abrade my back, split the skin under my shoulder blade, and I staggered off balance stepping into a pile of hay, away from the snake, and in a rustle, a motion, I felt something shoot up my pant leg from under the hay through the cuff of my jeans. And then another rattle from under the hay, and too much noise in the barn, and I froze, thinking. Cursing, thinking and cursing in my mind.

I could feel the thing against my leg, up my inner thigh from below my knee pushing itself up crawling in a slow rolling wave up the inside of my pelvis, tightening. I could feel the flesh heat roped and the foreign cold and the pressure of its body swelling and shrinking with each breath. Something was moving by my foot in the hay, moving the whole surface of the hay, and the rattling was ankle close. I dared not move. Took a breath, and a breath; I took three slow breaths and watched as the hay settled. Two rattlers going, one in the hay by my foot and one by the fawn.

I pulled my shirt up with fingertips. Under my leather belt, a snake’s head pressed chin flat against my skin. The tip of its nose had four holes and stuck out beyond my jeans. Its scaled head looked like bone instead of flesh, ivory like an accrescence of seashells spreading layered from its lips, ancient and dry. The top of its head tan, green, brown, it flicked its purple tongue, black purple and blue at the base from a hole in the center of its mouth. Its forked tongue tasted the air and flicked against my stomach with tickling tips. And I looked at its black slit eyes, new moons in green under horny crenellations, and in a flash I thought of the snake bites I had seen, flesh-wasting, necrotic, and I grabbed it, grabbed its head over tongue and eyes, squeezed, its whole head in my head, and I pulled to my arm’s length throwing, snake in the air, ripped away from me, and it was silhouetted against skylight, and I watched, falling, as its incongruously thick body slapped against the dirt floor behind me, feeling the rake of it still against my skin.

I yanked my foot from the hay, that singing, living hay, and jumped up onto the stall railing, clinging, and that bastard snake in the hay struck at me and missed; I heard the hiss and spitting strike, the rush, and I sat there holding the fence and breathing and holding and breathing and waiting.