The noon sun spilled invisible fire onto the weather-beaten pavement. Josh had been on the road for hours and his stride was beginning to totter. Walking to town no longer seemed like a good idea, especially without a jar of water. The streams and brooks he had seen as a child had dried up, leaving sun-scorched beds of rock and pebbles. He feet were sore and his head ached from the heat. Horseflies, attracted by the pungent odor of sweat, buzzed around him, zipping in to land stubbornly on his neck, his face and his clothing. He brushed them away, arms flopping back to his sides. And they came again. He no longer hummed, his throat too dry to sustain a note. Hot sweat drenched his clothing and stung his eyes, seeping acridly between his lips and into his mouth. He fantasized plunging into the wavering mirage on the road ahead until the mirage dissolved. Then he fantasized on the next one, and plodded on. The sky was cloudless; the air, windless. Nothing moved but the flies and Josh. He dared not look at the woods lining the road fifty feet from each shoulder. Though sparse and tinder-dry, they might tempt him with shelter from the sun and he would sink into a bed of crinkly leaves and stay there forever, shrouded in budworm webbing.

Josh's thoughts traveled back to his childhood, back to a blustery winter night when the wind had pounded against the walls of the shack, making in tremble and creak. Inside, it was warm with heat from the wood stove reaching into every corner of the room, and Josh was comfortable and sleepy in his bed as he listened to his father and Ned talking quietly and playing checkers. He stared through the slots of the grill at the flames, and the smell of burning wood was sweetened as it mingled with the smoke from his father's pipe.

Ned talked around his chewing tobacco: "Nope, Cal, I surely did not want to go over there and shoot up the Kaiser's army. T'tell ya the truth, I was scared so that I pissed my pants the first time I heard shells boomin' miles away, an' we was headin' for all that noise."

"No shame in that, Ned," his father said as he jumped two of Ned's pieces and removed them from the board. "Fear's a natural feeling. Keeps a man alive."

"Right you are, Cal. But that's not what bothered me so much at the time as wonderin' what the hell I was doin' headin' for all that noise an' not wantin' any part of it. But we was all tired, worn down from a long march with full kit, an' I kept walkin' towards that boomin', liftin' one foot in front of th' other an' wonderin' why."

A gust of wind battered the far wall and the entire shack groaned.

"There was wounded men bein' brung back all shot t' hell," he said with a distant look. "An' I wondered if they had any idea why they was wounded, why they'd gone into that boomin' to get themselves all shot up. An' I thought about patr'ism an' protectin' folks back home, an' lots of things, an ' before I knew it, we was smack in the middle of the boomin', lookin' over the tops of trenches at land that looked like it'd bin ripped an' torn by some giant plow gone haywire." Rolling the tobacco wad to the other side of his mouth, he added with finality. "Still don't know what the hell I was doin' there."

Josh was beginning to wonder the same thing.

Now, he took the coin from his pants pocket and studied it closely. Turning it slowly between his thumb and two fingers, fascinated by the clean edges and the pleasurable heft. He flipped it a few inches into the air and caught it. He flipped it again, this time a few inches higher. Before long, he was flipping it several feet into the air and the heat and the flies were forgotten. He was humming again, his eyes transfixed by the flipping coin. He watched it tumbling through the air, throwing off sparkles of sunlight as it came spinning down into his palm. Soon, it was as though his mind were spinning with the coin, his being merged with the being of the coin, shooting up and tumbling down. Everything but the coin washed out of his vision, and then the coin disappeared in a flash of brilliant white. Nausea churned tightly in his stomach as he felt his body dropping, his mind still spinning and his ears filled with humming.

He was uncertain how long he'd been unconscious but, judging from the position of the sun, it was not long. He felt rubbery as he raised himself to his feet. He shook the dizziness from his head and stooped to pick up his jacket. As he did so, he saw the coin on the pavement a few feet away. Surprised and elated at the same time, he snatched it up, inspected it closely, apologetically, and put it back in his pocket.

Every exposed part of his body was bright red. He was getting hot and cold flashes, and his body tingled with the imminent danger of not finding water soon. He could not understand how he could have misjudged the distance to town by so much. Nothing was as he remembered it.

He draped his jacket over his head and continued walking.