Now I'm a cage made of rosewood and steel

Pulling into the deserted gas station at night. This is a gas station that just encroaches miles of undeveloped land, near a park with a baseball field, with little kids in jerseys who pour out of minivans in the evening for summer games.

The gas station is closed, shuttered, with only lights above the gas pumps for people like me, tired moms driving back from the grocery store, stopping to get gas so she doesn't have to do it on the way to work in the morning.

The weather is perfect for windows down, for deep, even breaths, and long silences save the perfect song and the buzz of bugs that come out at night. I lean against my car, arms folded, and listen. And see. There is a late night game going on at the baseball field; I can just make out the dots of orange jerseys in the distance. Chris Bathgate's "Do What's Easy" is on in my car.

At my feet, ants are crawling along a crack leading up toward the gas pump, busy. Some are tussling with dead or dying winged bugs. I think of the article I just read about how ants don't have traffic jams, how even when you try to create a traffic jam for them, it doesn't trip them up. They have some innate sense of problem-solving, of anticipating an obstacle and working around it without much of a pause.

There are moths and other winged bugs flying all around me. A junebug is perched on the hood of my car. I look up, I remind myself to look up more often. Spiders perched in tattered webs, waiting for a meal. The crescent moon. The thick black sky, its wide-robed arms. Stars like freckles in the negative on quiet, still fingers.