Me and Darlene sprawled over the knobs of potatoes in our backs as the wispy sky moves slowly over us and we, under it. Me and Cy on our backs underneath a night of polluted stars, talking the things you talk then, hands locked behind heads. Our hands drift in and out of each other’s while the sacks shift underneath us and the sun beats down hard. The fire burns in peripheral sight, someone cooks meat, no one knows anything except that we are all about to disappear. The man picked us up from the rest stop, no questions, a thumb and into the back with you. I hadn’t talked to Cyrus in six years, seven, since I’d left, and if he saw me now. Whole years we talked about women in the abstract and women were the abstract, our four feet fanned out in the wishful suburban bluegrass. I cracked Darlene’s knuckle on accident. I was kneading it. She shifted and crushed my tibia and I let out a yelp, the wind over the back of the truck insistent as it had always been, though for that short time I had forgotten it. We did not apologize but lay to each other, sides pressed against the spotted white potato skins, and pushed tongues together. The drift of mindless neighborhood smoke along the furrows of folded paper plates. The sour-sweet tang. Sour-sweet, then sick. We straightened in the truck. Noses wrinkled. Squinted: it was. It was shit. We sat up, scoured our hands and our sitting places and the potatoes that rumbled around us. It was another minute before the scene allowed itself beside the highway: thousands upon thousands of black cows, under and between ports of shade and piles of their own putrid shit, unbellowing, unmoving, tame. Fields of fields of it, from the racing white line to far as the eye could imagine going. Not a single cow believing in a single thing. The smell stayed until we woke up again, still atop the potatoes, rattling on. We had closed our eyes so hard at the stench we fell asleep. In our oblivion it had gone.