The Second Coming

was no getting a purchase on it. But it was possible to stand on the ground and push it up with a forked stick of dogwood until the transom was balanced on the gambrel. Then, half propping, half holding stick on ledge, she climbed up beside it. Now the angle was right. She could lean forward against the lower slope, ah safe! both hands free to push transom past the gambrel angle and let it down carefully on the upper slope—but there was no sliding it laterally now, it must be lined up carefully.
    Hope rose in her, then a confidence, that the random fit of transom to hole would somehow work out better than if she had measured hole and designed window to fit. It did. It was better than a fit. The frame of the transom overlapped the steel sash of the greenhouse, the scuffed wood engaging rusty metal all around, and weighted down in a friction bond so strong she couldn’t even budge the transom toward her down the slope.
    A fit by chance is romance, she said to herself.
    Climbing down, she was already thinking how to fasten it more securely. A strong wind could blow it off. Perhaps a few nails in the frame, the nails above wired to the iron fleurs-de-lis and below to the mechanism of the window vents.
    Tired now, she stretched out on her bunk. The afternoon sun shone directly on the upper slope of stained glass. The light broke into colors which filled the little room. Perhaps she had stirred up a suspension from the potsherds and the moss. The gold was like dust in the air and the violet made a vapor.
    She gazed up at the transom. A cornucopia dumped out its fruit and flowers, purple grapes, yellow corn, scarlet strawberries, golden pumpkins, boxy pink rhododendron, the harvest tumbling down a blue sky to a green earth where fascicles of pine needles spelled out Autumn. Rhododendron! Then the stained glass had been designed for this place, my place. What had happened to her Winter, Spring, and Summer? Carted off by Tut tomb robbers. But perhaps they and many other treasures are hidden in the cellar. Kegs of nails, books, such as the Swiss family of Robinson found on their wrecked ship.
    Something bumped the potting table. She leaned out. The dog was turning round and round in the moss to make a bed.
    She took a nap.
    When she woke, violet vapor swarmed in her eyelashes. She took out her Scripto pencil and notebook and wrote:
    I am here.
    I need from town: milk, matches, dog food, saw. There is plenty of stove wood, dead chestnut I think. When did all the chestnuts die? What about bathing? How to get the stove up from the basement? What kind of stove is it? How does a stove work? Does it burn wood or coal? Does it heat water?
    I need to make a living. I do not have a house but I have a greenhouse. I can live here and either get a job in town or make a living from the greenhouse. How do you make a living in a greenhouse? With greens.
    I need to remember what I knew when I wrote to myself in this notebook, for example, that this is my place. Because now I can only remember things after I see them (somewhere I must have worked with stained glass, knew about cames).
    In order to make a living I must remember what I can do.
    Remember. Start at the beginning. My name is Allison. I was born in nineteen-fifty-something, sixty-something?
    Try.
    The first thing I remember is my embarrassment with strangers. No, embarrassment for strangers. They seemed so vulnerable. What if one should hurt their feelings? Once as a child when I was walking home from school I stopped to talk to a colored maid hanging out wash. She seemed very nice. But I began to worry how to break off the conversation and leave. I could not think of a way that might not hurt her feelings. So I had to wait until she finished hanging out the wash and went inside.
    Very well, start at the other end. Yesterday. Last week.
    After you make a living, then what do you do? How do you live?
    When she leaned back on the knapsack pillow wedged into a corner of glass, a ruby swatch of light fell across her face. The down on her cheek turned fiery.
    Yes, now I remember something. It was because she had sat so in the closed ward in the same lookout position, head wedged in an angle of the wingback chair. From here too she could see the two places people come from, the highway which ran past the main gate and the door to the hall.
    Using the binoculars her father had given her for birdwatching, she was watching out not for the birds but for the bread truck. A car came