ESTHER GLEANED THE last nit from her grandson’s hair and the bottom of the lowering sun punctured on the pine treetops and its light splintered across the yard. She rinsed her hands in a bucket of seawater and took her pipe back from Eha and struck a match and kindled it alight and dropped the match into the can of kerosene-soaked nits and a flame whupped from the can’s mouth then burned wobbly and dim like a brazier at an improvised altar in a nomads’ camp. Ethan went down to the shore and walked into the water up to his thighs and bent and bathed his hair. The salt water burned his scalp
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