Chapter 254 Looking Back

• Proserpina
• I came awake early in the morning and lay for a while listening to the sounds around me as the world came awake slowly.
• The mornings in rural America begin not with alarm clocks, but with sound. A rooster’s crow cut the pale blue haze before sunrise, sharp and insistent, answered by the low, contented murmur of cows stirring in the pasture a few miles away. Sparrows and meadowlarks stitch the air with their songs, bright and quick, while crows trade coarse calls across the fields like gossipers at the edge of town.