Summary

In poetic first-person language, narrator Jonah describes the morning he found himself in after waking up from a dream. In that world, he says, “an entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm” (76). He recalls the dream as being about war, and seeks comfort from his mother. Her eyes, he says, “were as dark as the eyes of a salmon who has just returned to the place where it was spawned” (79). She is unable to comfort him, and neither is his physically powerful father, who comes home shortly afterwards and finds them both weeping.

Jonah’s parents are unable to prevent him being taken from them by a gang of soldiers who, strangely enough, know the family’s name and that Jonah had a twin brother who was stillborn. Jonah describes some...