There was once a man who walked in the dim hours between night and day. Three strides behind him walked his mother and in his mother’s arms, his infant son. The man carried his old sorrows and stories and memories like that of his brother whom cancer had stolen into twilight.

Families knot backwards into themselves. When one dies, a globe ripens and a new baby arrives to replace who was lost. Or even restore, as was the case with this man, whose brother stepped into the untold then turned back. When the man’s wife became pregnant, the man suspected they would have a son.

Indeed a son was born, and the man recognized his brother immediately — a crease in the sole of his foot, the smallness of his ears, and the broad forehead behind which the stories of many lives resided briefly before lifting into silence under the vivid hospital light.

Now the man walks the neighborhood, the proud father of his brother, balding with joy and exhaustion. The audience of his neighbors suffers a reluctant doubt. They listen, nod, and encourage their own children to flap their chubby arms at his brother-son.

They want everything he says to be true: that we never lose anyone, that we pass through time with a collection of souls netted to us, that our dead wait to circle back to the neighborhood of the living. What a relief it would be to know that the push and pull we feel is not the cranking rhythms of our own time, but of all time and of them, urging us forward until it is our turn to be carried.