Like a short, light sound of knocking at the window--the insignificant sound of one small fist, or a finger tapping lightly. The sound has no resonance, no engaging plea, just a tick, tick, tapping, as if a long, thin branch, a forgotten winter limb, a black stray stuck between the green decided at this precise moment to tick and scratch at my bedroom window. The more--the harder I listened, the less I heard. The more I focused, the sound disappeared.

It's time for me to turn away from the glass and think of something else: my brother driving to Island Park to pick up some chowder and clam cakes; Flo's diner where everyone waits with numbered stones in their hands, and the seagulls prance at the end of the parking lot, pecking for pinched clams and greasy crumbs.

My thoughts are not enough to drown the sound of that ticking, that tapping, that scratching, that damn branch of the tree outside my bedroom window.

I should have cut it down before my mother died. I should have set it aflame, burnt it to ashes, and think of other thoughts, of something light and airy. My friend Jimmy took my car to the body shop. It suffered small dents and a fractured tail lamp and the wheels pulled to the right, always to the right, and my wife said how sad you look, like your mother at the wake.

She's dead, and she was smiling, I screamed. Goddamn it she was smiling.

But that's a sewn-up smile, a false impression.

I walk out of the room and step into my garden. The sun seems bright without my glasses on. Birds don't sit, do they? They pluck the air and sing, like my dead mother when she was alive looked magnificently mature when she died. I'm going back inside to listen to the ghosts counting sheep beside my pillow. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three...

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Joseph M. Faria was born on the island of Sao Miguel, in the Azores. He was brought to the United States when he was nine months old, by his mother, in 1950. He studied Creative Writing at Roger Williams University. He published his first poem when he was twenty-three: "The Black Crow Symphony: 4^th Movement", Ishmael, Spring 1973. His short story "Threshold" won 2nd Prize in the 1997 CWA National Writing Competition. His first book of short stories, From a Distance, was published in the Azores in June 1998 by Nova Grafica Press. He lives and breathes in Bristol, RI.