It was all too obvious what could go wrong.

We could hear all the wrong things. Anger. Stupidity. The subtracting silence of despair. The pitiless gnashing of time, the thunderous indifference of nature. Surely, along with Mozart and Mommy, we also hear the insanity of the whip-poor-will, the ghoulish wailing of coyotes, the death scream when the owl hits the rabbit.

Or gunshots.

Yes, she had heard a gunshot. Because now she heard another.

From where? Inside herself? Outside?

Two hard cracks echoed across the landscape mapped inside her sheriff’s brain, four hundred square miles of farm and forest, ridge and coulee.

Somewhere. Anywhere.

She fell back upon the bed. As her dream resumed, the gunshots echoed. Womb became dirt became a tomb. The Bad Axe soil she had tried to cultivate—her de-thistled pasture, her expanding vegetable and flower gardens, her new acres of alfalfa—poured over her like rain.

Hot. Dry. Black. Rain.

Heavy.

Sheriff Kick groaned and lurched up again, desperate to fully awaken. She wrested over her head and flung away her sweaty T-shirt: BARN HAIR, DON’T CARE. Red-blond strands stuck across her mouth as she pitched onto her side and groped emptily for Harley. Help me! But her husband the baseball hero was a hundred miles away representing the Bad Axe Rattlers at a Midwest League all-star event. He had won the home-run derby last night. Today was the game. Opie, help me! But her oldest child, the family’s wise one, was away at summer camp.

Ten-double-zero! Ten-double-zero! Officer down! All units respond!

The sheriff could not wake up.

Shovel by shovel, the dirt massed upon her. She arched under the weight. She clenched her sheets, drove her hip bones up. Her mouth gaped.

“Unngh!”

She contracted every muscle, exploded upward. Contracted and exploded, sucked air, spit dirt, kicked, clawed.

At last she breached.

Gasped for air.

Cried in jerks and gulps like a baby.

Caught her breath.

Turned on the little rawhide lamp beside her bed.

There it was. Before sleep, she had found her diary from high school, the summer she had turned sixteen, and she had found the page where she had written down the recipe.

Cut several fresh (bright green) dandelion leaves and put them in a clean glass or plastic container…

“No,” she whispered, touching the clasp on the diary. “I can’t be. I’m careful. And we hardly ever even…”

But she was seventeen days late.

The recipe for lassies, her Grandma Heinz had advised her, who don’t dare go to the drugstore or the doctor.

At dawn she endured a stinging bladder as she searched the pantry for an empty Mason jar. When she found one, a pint that once contained strawberry-rhubarb jam, she dropped her cell phone into her robe pocket and hurried outside.