At dusk the crack drinks light. A band of young men tried to carve their names there, drunk with the arrogance of people who think permanence is their due. The marks didn’t take; the tree, like a patient judge, closed around the insults until the scars were only stories told over beer. That night, one of them woke with the memory of a woman he had never met singing a lullaby in a language he almost knew. He quit drinking the next month and took a bus to a town three states over without saying why. No one asked; sometimes small miracles arrive wrapped in the shapes of ordinary exits.