!In space I am at home --- agk's diary 12 January 2015 (on paper) 28 January 2025 @ 14:17 UTC (transcribed) --- written on Rite Aid 15x10cm ruled notebook with ballpoint pen when I lived with mom's parents typed on Pinebook Pro in the living room --- Dad likes to watch stars and go for runs down the rural route. Mom quit smoking when she was pregnant with me and didn't start again but dad did. He was always concerned with getting away, losing himself in the stars or mountains or other peoples' busi- ness. He did weddings and funerals and visited sick people so he could get away from our bastard Pa. Dad and I stood by a small brick house across the empty parking lot from a country church cut out of a southern cornfield. Dad looked up, at a million points of light in the sky. He was like Pa. Maybe if he hadn't run so far he would have been more different. I tried to see where dad was pointed, as he hunkered next to me with my wisp of thin white hair at the edge of the carport in the middle of the summer night. "It's the only one not staying still," he said. His pointing finger tracked across the heaven fast and smooth as a second hand. "Do you see it now?" Once I saw the space shuttle I watched til it set at the horizon. They like to be good observers, dad and Pa, better observers than women and little girls. Walking the edge between the cornfield and the woodlot with Pa a year later when the corn was in fringe, Pa saw the only bobcat he ever saw back where he shot turkeys. He saw it and stopped, still like a hound on point. I stood still by his knee, waited to find out what I was supposed to have noticed. More than twenty years later when Pa was in bed, when he shook with Parkinson's and was embarrassed by diarrhea, and dementia softened his meanness, he still remembered that I couldn't see the bobcat. Polished like a stone in the creek, the tough majesty of the bobcat and his six-year-old grand- daughter's inability to perceive it was among his treasured memories. Mom worked all day in town with women on drugs and their families. I didn't know, it was outside my universe of house, side yard, parking lot, church, and gravestones, but AIDS probably killed its three millionth person that summer. New prisons went up across the state. Duke lost to Louisville in the Final Four that spring and history was coming to an end. In the morning I remembered the unearthly point- lessness of the spot of light dad showed me the night before. He was busy, working on his sermon or something in the living room. The custodian Bonnie wasn't in the church. I liked to watch her with her Dustbuster vacuum up the mountain of dead flies that fell behind the altar after failing to escape against the big twin abstract stain glass windows. There weren't enough dead flies for Bonnie to come. I clipped the leash on the collar of my dog, a brown boxer as big as I was named Cleo. We went to play on the gravestones. I could hold her leash and hop from headstone to headstone. Cicadas buzzed louder the hotter the day got. Mom hated Carolina blue. That was the color the sky was. Behind it was probably a space shuttle I couldn't see. I was like that space shuttle, me and Cleo. Nobody could see us either. Nobody really cared what we did or where we went, so we went, like Pa went from the sharecrop and coal mine and dad went from Pa into the ministry. We pushed at the edge of the known universe. We left the graveyard and left behind everything I knew when we left the summer heat and followed the trail cut by possum and cat through the brush into the cool, past the edge of the sky. A muddy pool of water reflected tree-shaded light. I painted on my face with bright pink crushed out of pokeberries. I ate a muddy, sharp-tasting spring onion and stood in stagnant warm creek water. Mosquito larvae darted away from my chubby feet. Cleo smelled at something then sat on her haunches and looked at me. We weren't breaking any rule. There were no rules. We wouldn't be in trouble if we told, but there was no one to tell. We'd found a secret place neither dad nor Pa had ever seen, a place so utter- ly unlike the wide-open sweaty hot world we'd left. It was a place that loved us, a place God made just for us. It was our space shuttle. If we stayed I'd never get big, never have to mother a runaway man. There beside the eyeless mummy of a dead possum, face and palms bright pink from crushed poke- berries, I said my prayers. Cleo said hers, then turned around twice and laid down in the cool mud. I lay down beside her, hugged her, and dreamed--- Jesus and Coach K. met Macbeth's three witches at the edge of the cornfield and woodlot. God liked my dream. He cared where I was. I guess God likes no-good country children. There were no people for angels to slip on the skin of, for God to love me through, so He hugged me with scratchy shortleaf pine branches against his chest of mud and spring onions. He hugged me and Cleo. We hugged back. Between apocalypse and apocalypse we rested in a moment of undeserved mercy. A tick crawled on my leg. I felt the tickle, let it crawl. I'd kill it soon enough in the coffee can of kerosene on the back stoop when I got hungry and left up out of the woods.