She tells me about one night in September when she woke up to a blazing light in her room. Her bed was vibrating and she thought it was an earthquake until she felt her body rise and start to move toward the window. The sash flew up and the screen was ripped off. Ann says what came next was like the sting you get before frostbite, followed by a numbness that crept from her fingers and toes and moved through her thighs, her shoulders, and on toward her heart. She tried to scream, but her throat was swollen tight.

Stinky jumped onto the windowsill and started hissing. He had fur then, Ann says, orange and yellow swirled together, and it stood on end, prickling against the beam like needle points. Stinky bared his teeth and Ann says his eyes reflected the light so intensely it looked like lasers shooting out of him, and suddenly everything went dark and Ann dropped to the ground, hitting the back of her head on the bedside table. She clutched the rag rug on the floor around her and crawled underneath the mattress, where she lay stunned until morning. When daylight came and she had enough courage to come out, she found the window still open, shreds of the screen in the bushes outside and Stinky, bald and quivering, under a pile of dirty clothes in the closet.

When she isn’t collecting tickets, Ann travels around the country going to abductee conventions with her cat, holding on to his hairless body as truth. She will not go anywhere without him. I watch Stinky through the glass while he is sleeping and I think about devotion. I know Ann worries what will happen when he dies, and why shouldn’t she—she knows what it’s like to live alone—and when he’s gone and the light comes back into her room, she’ll know as she’s being pulled through the window that this time she is being taken away because there is no one who loves her enough to stop it.

I pick up a bunch of alfalfa and hold it in the air. Marysue reaches with her trunk and takes it out of my hand. As soon as the food is in, she’s back to see if I have any more. Her trunk searches my palm as if she is reading my lifeline.

Joseph says that elephants can recognize dead relatives by feeling their bones. They spend hours turning over the remains, stroking the curves of the skull. Sometimes, they will take pieces away with them and carry them for miles before letting them go.