Last month, midway through the seven-hour drive between Marfa and Austin, my friends and I sat at a picnic table over burnt winter grass, eating the last of our forty grapefruits and some cold steak whose marbling had turned to candle wax. An old man approached us from some distance, making his way over with difficulty. We waited to be hit up for a handout. He wore suspenders over a neat plaid shirt open to a sunburnt throat, and his eyelids were folded over like dog-eared pages. His white mustache combed the wind, and he called us all ma’am.

He’d seen us wrestling our flapping map and had come to point out the landmarks: the dainty bank with Doric columns and plywood for windows, the old hospital, the old hotel, the old pharmacy. Everything was now something else, or shuttered—it was a hipster-free, pre-Marfa situation, a town dying like a tree dies, from the center out. My friend studied the black-and-yellow business card he gave her. “Bee removal! We could have used you when they were gobbling up our avocados.” He looked over our lunch spread. “I guess you could spare them just a little bit.” He spoke so much slower than we did.

It was a faint reproach, but I felt a rush of shame and also excitement. The line actually felt good in the mouth. “I guess you could spare them just a little bit.” We’d assumed he would ask us for something. The yellow jackets had scissored off such tiny chunks. We were huge, lumbering as we swatted them away. A small moment had engulfed the larger one. I recognized this flash of moral vertigo: it’s found in the short stories of Joy Williams.

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