PONOS was the personified Greek spirit of hard labor and toil. The wide, gravel path snaked through a scrub meadow joining two working-class neighborhoods. Every kid in the neighborhood walked it ... [+]
My nephew flies a drone over my grandparents' empty house, over the orchard and empty barn, and past glazed windows—sun igniting the stained wallpaper of empty rooms. Every day the temperature slips— minus five, minus ten, and still the fire department plots to burn the house. We wait for the match to strike— a flame as slender as a finger. They'll bring in hay bales and wood pallets to kindle what is empty. It hardly makes sense, the scale of what will come. My grandpa lit one match each autumn, put a log on the fire every night before bed, stoked the fire every morning with apple wood until