From "Borealis" by Sloan

"In Tucson recently, a friend found out her father died in front of the house where I was hanging laundry. The entryway where she screamed opened something up. Our dogs, normally peaceful toward each other, had a fight. A javelina charged the front door. A friend gave us some salt mixed with the remains of a roadrunner to sprinkle on the thresholds. “You have to tell the spirit of her father that she will be O.K. Bring him flowers.” I called my own father and listened to him talk about his best friend, who’d recently lost his wife. Some other guy his best friend had recently reconnected with from childhood would sit with him in the car, and they would smoke cigarettes for hours. My dad sounded left out: “I can’t be around all that smoke,” he said. This is how I’m accustomed to talking about ghosts in the desert."