The woman seems to get her bearings and reaches for the steering wheel, and Miriam sees that panicked rabbit look.

Sighing, she pulls the gun, points it at the windshield.

The woman's hands go up.

"Good lesbian," Miriam murmurs, then comes around to the passenger side and eases her screaming bones into the seat.

The woman gapes. Miriam holds the gun in an unsteady hand.

"Barnegat Light," Miriam says.

The woman's mouth moves, but no words come out.

"Sorry," Miriam says. "I meant it as a question. Barnegat Light?"

"Whuh-what about it?" The woman's voice is raspy, like she's talking through a coffee grinder. Obviously a smoker. Miriam wonders if that's what she'll sound like in twenty years.

"Where is it?"

"Luh-Long Beach Island. At the northern tip."

"How do I get there, and how long?"

"You go that way," the woman indicates the direction opposite of the way she was going, "until you reach the Garden State Expressway. Then you take that south – no! North, north, sorry, until you can get onto 72, and 72 will take you east over the causeway to LBI. Only one muh-main road on LBI, so just head north till you see the lighthouse. It's maybe a forty-five minute trip, maybe uh, an hour."

"Last question. You smoke?"

The woman nods, hasty, shaky.

"Give me your cigarettes."

The driver fumbles a box of Virginia Slims from the cupholder in the door.

"Uck. You smoke these?" Miriam asks, then waves it off. "Whatever."

Miriam takes the pack, and her finger touches –

It's twenty-three years from now and the woman steps off her porch. She's a bag of bird bones, and she trembles her way out the driveway as a light snow drifts around her, carried on whorls and corkscrews by a cold wind. The woman goes to the mailbox, gets the mail, and then takes one step on a shoe-sized patch of black ice. Her leg kicks out, her head hits the mailbox, and she lies there. Hours pass. Evening comes. Snow builds up on her face, but she's still not dead, and she manages to pull out a slim little cigarette from her pink robe and light it up before finally succumbing to the slow dragging hands of hypothermia.

– the woman's finger as the pack passes between their grips.

Miriam blinks. Shakes it off, then thumbs in the cigarette lighter, gets it warmed up, and plugs one of the thin little pipe cleaner cigarettes into her mouth.

"Now," Miriam mumbles around the unlit cigarette, "get the fuck out of this car before I hit you in the face with the gun and break all the tiny bones in your ear. Keep on smoking, by the way. Good for you."

The lady throws open the door and scurries out of the car like a cat that just got shot in the ass with a pellet rifle.

Miriam lights her cigarette, slides over the seat divider, and throws the Subaru into drive.

Her lungs fill with magic nicotine. Her foot stomps on the pedal.