This is my favorite part. It starts and ends here. The pebbles shine, the plan worked, Hansel Triumphant. Lesson number one: be sneaky and have a plan. But the stupid boy goes back, makes the rest of the story postscript and aftermath. He shouldn’t have gone back. And this is the second lesson I took from the story: when someone is trying to ditch you, kill you, never go back.

Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

I am singing now while Rome burns.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there, either. So far, it hasn’t come up.

Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.