In this house, with its weather-beaten siding, crumbling gables, untended lawn, two-car garage occupied by a single rusted vehicle, and ramshackle shed next to a neglected garden . . . a house built long ago by a young man for his new wife, where they raised their children, sent them into the world, grew old and died . . . inside this house are two men who know nothing of the family whose feet scuffed these floorboards and whose voices echo from the faded walls.

Before the sun rises, one of them will die.

I am not here to give warning. I am summoned by forces I do not understand to bear witness, to stand vigil beneath the Strawberry Moon and herald this man’s passing. If I wanted to do more, I could not. I am like a living person locked in a useless shell of a body, fully aware but unable to even blink an eye.

They say that when you die your life flashes before you, revealing everything you have lost. That may be true for some, although I do not know how any man alive could know this. In my final seconds, I stared into a pair of greedy eyes that smoldered like piss holes in a snow bank while the logging camp foreman plunged one of my own knives into my gut. I saw nothing from my past. Not the faces of my beloved parents back in Ireland, full of trepidation and pride as I set out to make my way in the New World. Not the young woman—I no longer recall her name or how she looked, but in the stories they tell she is always beautiful—who swore she would endure the arduous 45-day crossing to join me in New Brunswick once I established a place for us.