Her mother had filters running in every room. She was trying new filters every month. She was burning through her retirement savings. At the time, it infuriated Izabel—her mother’s shortsightedness—because Izabel expected her to live. She went around every day expecting it, like it wasn’t much to ask.

When Izabel sat close to her mother, she saw the tiny chips at the bottom of her mother’s top teeth. The forks were doing it, the spoons and the glasses and the mugs. They were the same ones she’d had for decades, but the nebulizer was weakening her teeth. The steroid inhaler was making them sensitive. Still Izabel caught herself thinking her mother was well, on the whole.

Izabel didn’t know how she could have thought that.

At the mall’s exit Izabel let Cami push the button that called a car. A light lit up over the spot marked 8.

“Eight!” Cami yelled.

Izabel nodded.

Above the panel was another taped-up poster, like the one of Baba Yaga in the food court. This one was of a kappa, the frog-like yōkai that waited at the edges of bodies of water for people that they could pull in and eat. At the bottom of the poster was a limb, an arm, bloody at the shoulder socket, where it had clearly been torn.

“Is that Walkappa?” Cami asked. Walkappa was a character from the show Yo-kai Watch, where the yōkai had been made playful, and mostly harmless.

“That’s a kappa, honey. Who Walkappa is based on.”

“Cool!” Cami yelled.

Izabel didn’t know if she’d noticed the bloody arm, but knowing Cami, she probably had.

Izabel tried to imagine who was drawing these new posters. A new Banksy? Or just a teenager interested in old graffiti, or images of New York City’s papered plywood walls? Or maybe they’d read some article about old propaganda, the fliers dropped from planes.

Another family came up and called a car. A woman by herself with three children. One on her hip, one at her hand, and one, about as old as Cami, allowed to wander a little farther. A child who will return to you when called. Izabel wondered if this woman was tricked somehow into having this many children this close together.

When a car pulled into spot 8, Izabel and Cami put their masks over their faces and walked through the mall’s double set of doors.

Kaito fell asleep in Cami’s room while putting Cami to bed. Izabel stayed up watching an episode of Fixer Upper where they were taking an old wooden house down to the studs. The air kept filling with dust.

Near the end of the episode, Kaito woke up and stumbled back to their room. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “You want to go to bed?”

“Why? Want to talk about something?”

“A little,” she said.

“I can do it. I’m awake enough.”