The Tortoise In Keystone Heights by Deborah Ager
When I knew, it was raining. Winter in decline. I was tired. You in your soaked shirt diffused into the western sky bulging with clouds, speeding cars a few feet away— why would they not slow down?
Though afternoon, a slip of moon busied itself with rising, and it had to mean something. If only the moon were not out. You shoveled the crushed tortoise and her eggs off the highway into the dirt.
Those soft, white eggs. This is how I love you: drenched with Florida rain and looking like hell, Florida itself a hell, the moonlit rain a rain of fire.
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