“With a gun.”

“What’s a gun?”

“An old thing,” Izabel said. Every time he shot, she could hear, in her head, the sound effects that children used to make for gunshots, that she used to make as a child.

The man’s car turned a different direction. Izabel and Cami both moved around in the car to better watch where he was headed.

“Is he a bad guy?” Cami said.

“I don’t know,” Izabel said. But she felt like he was. If his car hadn’t been so covered in pollen maybe she would have been able to make him out. Describe him to the police. She felt her hands shaking. Was he last night’s killer?

They reached the main street of the town. They passed the school, the spiritual center, the entrance to the mall and its network of long domes. The community center came next. Izabel remembered what used to make a main street: a market, a post office, ice cream shops with lines out the doors.

They made it to the classroom as the arts and crafts class was starting. Another child ran over to hug Cami, a friend from school. Her mother was standing by the wall. She was a tall, Black woman, and the letters of the alphabet were taped up behind her. The letters had Sesame Street characters beside each of them. Elmo was holding acorns in front of the A. And for T, Cookie Monster was holding a tree’s trunk, standing beneath its full branches.

“You pretend to be something,” Cami’s friend yelled out.

Cami began to act like a robot.

Izabel decided to introduce herself to the mother. “I’m Izabel.”

“Andy,” the other mother said.

“What’s that short for?”

“Andromeda.”

“Really?” Izabel said.

“Yes. My parents liked the Greek myths.”

“Even the ones about stringing up women.” Izabel was trying to be funny but it came out wrong.

Andy tried to laugh anyway. “My mother thought the world would end from the rising waters.”

Izabel imagined every woman in the world as a metaphoric woman, chained to the rocks for the sea monster, which turned out just to be the sea itself. She said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay. I like my name.”

“I like it, too,” Izabel said. And she meant it.

The women went back to watching the children. Izabel felt she’d failed again at small talk, how she always did, but she was so tired from the night at the hospital that she didn’t care. Instead she kept thinking about the myth of Andromeda and about the rising sea levels that everyone was so obsessed with thirty years ago.