ONLY MORE SO You see it was very much like this. In the flatland dregs, the fat-coated soldiers knocked at the door, so a woman was forced, with a gritty smile, to invite them in, to sit by her yellow fire, to swallow up her walls. In the corner her husband rubbed a wooden rifle, tapped wooden boots against a wooden floor, thinking, thinking visitors are cold as bad luck. He looped his fingers under his belt and turned to gravel. The soldiers, making circles in the dust on the hearth, asked the woman to remember the unremembered: the jewelry sold for food, the Moravian lace curtains. Where are the rings? Two and now one? The woman spun her wedding band around her finger and gave them her best, "we were here before you" silver glare. Surrounded by dust and half-opened words, the woman's mottled eyes brought a dull patina to the repeated questions. The sharp wool collars of the soldiers pointed south; inside, the crudely made benches evaporated into firewood. It was like this: the woman's hips swayed like harmonicas when the men watched her fetch water and run it into the basin, cracking ice with her fingernails. They asked her, Why do trees mean? and What does water stand for? while their stares mocked the broken windows, and pain, itself, counted the woman's buttons as they easily slipped through the stitching of her clothes. You see it was all so simple: they wanted the smooth golden of her neck, the warm nest of her skirt; her loss shifting like daggers beneath their skin. As wind fragmented, as doors burned, as fires latched, the last woman, this last woman, clasped a bowl to her chest knowing, knowing, what the snow outside pretended, knowing that nothing important ever belonged to her. That now she must survive by owning air, holding back the red, the full, the bare, the proud canvases of flat language paper that once told her everything she needed to know. It was like this, only more so.