The house wept like a Madonna statue whenever it rained, steady streams in the corners of the walls, the paint bubbling and blistering. The trees wept pears, when it rained and when it didn’t, grass-green fists with gnarled stems and woody warts, blossom-end rot and speckled spores. They gathered all the pears, the rotten ones and the unripe, and loaded them into the kitchen sink, letting the faucet run, letting water hit the hard fruit and splash back onto their rain-streaked t-shirts, and upstairs the water ran into the house, down the walls, and outside the water rained onto the tree roots and into their well and up through their faucet. They talked about climbing into the sink with the pears, nestling snug among knuckled comrades. They talked about pressing into the saturated walls, turning into water stains that looked vaguely like people. They talked about lying down beneath the branches, pressing themselves in at the feet of the pear trees, transubstantiating into the next year’s harvest. They wanted a time of no more decisions; they wanted to be water, running where it might — pears: dropping, rotting, bursting their skins.

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