Trace their airy orifices to their center and proceed and, slowly, you’ll reach the night-lit sky of their common struggles. Constellations trace the hairy hand that first lifted them out of their soupy stoicism. On the ground it’s business as usual as various grains, widely thought to enlarge the teeth so as to facilitate chewing, command top prices to be paid for in seasonal dishes or by money order. The problem of people coming to blows after disagreements over proper pronunciation has largely subsided after it was agreed that epistolary communiqués were a more refined mode until the letter carriers demanded additional deference to their decisions on certain matters including headings and physical education. And still the gears turn and the wheels crank and the antennas bow gently in welcoming the night’s programming and the telephones lie in their cradles because no one knows how to say what everyone’s thinking without sounding like a stew or a beet farmer trimming the horizon for borscht that won’t be eaten until the cabbage is done and the sun hangs like a head turned down to see if the smell traveled with heat and rose or at least to mind the curb. At this point it’s safe to say that they’re not coming. They never come and still it’s not always safe to say it for fear of reprisal. But just where they are is the sort of thing that anyone can imagine and most are probably right for they spread their tendrils with the sweeping certainty of a rat-bitten salesman come to peddle this the last, though finest, of his extension cords: freedom can be yours. And with it you too can do what you like but you ought not go that Hardy’s again. It’s their loss, but your shame, but their “wall of the banished”, but your picture sitting alone as you were when the police entered.

And you won’t get the report because it hasn’t been written