The man took a place by the edge of the lake, a seat on a familiar rock where he had sat many times before. This was the place where the sunset always gave the best show, melting down between two hills decked in pine and aspen, throwing gold at the slope that rose behind him. This evening was no disappointment as far as sundown went, and the fish feeding left soft circles like targets expanding in the surface, riffling the reflections of gold-pink in the sky. The desperate pain was not pummeling him now, but had resolved itself into a deeper current that was propelling him toward sleep, the final sleep from which none awaken. He carried a small bundle in his hand, and he unwrapped it carefully so as not to spill the contents into the water. He placed the pistol on a flat spot of the rock, wiped his forehead with the cloth, and dropped the cloth carelessly on the bank behind him. He had written several notes, but they had struck him as maudlin, or falsely noble, or vengeful. He had at last decided that the act itself said everything there was to say, that any string of words was superfluous.

The sun was bisected by the ridge between the hills, and he could see it deepen to red as it visibly crept downward. This was the chosen moment, and he picked up the revolver, cool in his hand. He spun the chamber, checked that the nose of the bullet was in the sweet spot, and raised the barrel to his forehead. He lifted his eyes to the sun, to see the top of the sphere suspended like a bloody nail clipping in the cleft of hills. It was at that moment that he heard a voice in a quiet sing-song tone, punctuated by the hollow plop of a stone tossed into the lake.

The child squatted on the rocky narrow beach, singing sweetly to himself and flipping small pebbles into the water. The man lowered the pistol and placed it back upon the rock. He walked along the bank to where the child was, the boy apparently unaware of his existence, unaware of anything but the song he sang and the plip-plop of the stones. Nonetheless, when the man was within some ten feet of him, the boy turned, smiled, and said "hello". The man commented on the lateness of the hour and the loneliness of the place, and he asked the child where he lived. "There," the boy pointed toward the wide up-running valley where the sun had dropped, "there, the other side of the lake." The boy scratched another pebble loose and tried to skip it, but it sank at once. "What were you doing with that gun?" The man looked away and cleared his throat, and then said "nothing. Something. At any rate I haerd you singing and it stopped me." The boy paused, a rock poised for the throw. "But I didn't stop you." He pointed with the stone. "See?"

On the rock, a dark shape lay slumped in the dimness of early nightfall and the man sat down in the grass. "I see," he said, the boy flinging the rock, then standing up and picking up a pair of black canvas sneakers. "I'm sorry," said the child. "I have to go home now." The boy moved off along the water's edge, taking up the song again, and the man was just on the edge of recalling the words to the song, almost as if he might have supplied the next verse himself. He lay back in the grass as the darkness came on and gazed at the infinity of stars in the sky above him until at last he closed his eyes, and the stars, the grass, the lake, the falling sun, the song were all one and he sank into all of it, cool and quiet as a stone.