We are 400 degrees Celsius in combustion-proof suits, our ears to the surface to hear a planet quaking, because there is no sound in the exosphere. My six-year-old daughter is too extreme for most organisms to adapt to. She sings about Nashville and addiction. She’s having trouble reconciling the emotional demands of college football rivalry with the ethic of “love your neighbor” they teach her at church. Wild Mercury Sound cannot do this spiritual work for her. We both crave synthesis — that you might think our falseness is real or that the Pirandellian effect of our quaking might de-realize everything and everyone, ourselves, and Guy Clark. She wants the happiness-ever-after, but I keep telling her: Wild Mercury Sound is the bones of many eaten knights, the beat inevitable, or men who die offscreen and beyond the boundaries of the page. We are out of milk.