Izabel’s mother hadn’t told Izabel about the fires of 2017, the maps of smoke, the evacuations, the number of missing, the number of dead. But her mother didn’t know that the world was about to end in disaster—one that left all the houses standing. No one surviving or not surviving in swimming pools. Maybe if her mother had known, then she would have told Izabel about disaster all the time. How it affected people. How it continued past any one particular event.

Some of the news stories were about how there weren’t enough masks, there weren’t the right masks for the poor conditions, for all that smoke. There were so many pictures of the world left behind, the fields of ash.

These pictures suggested yet another possible apocalyptic world to Izabel, one that maybe they were still continuing toward, but to which no one had arrived yet. They had arrived at this apocalyptic world too quickly. It had won the race.

She read an article about the proposed cleanup. There were so many organizations involved—the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, and the California Department of Public Health. They had a plan, in theory, but the state of things couldn’t be evaluated. They couldn’t begin until all the fires were out.

Izabel almost enjoyed the story—the nonsolution solutions, everything always impossible and continuing anyway.

She read an article about the ash itself. The people digging through it with their bare hands. The chemicals that can pass through skin. The hazard. They wrote about how the rains hadn’t come, but how, when they did, the ash would run into watersheds. The ash-filled rains would run into the yards of homes where families thought the fire had not touched them. The fire would touch them this way.

If old homes had asbestos shingles, that was in the air now. That old now, which Izabel relived alongside her life.

“It’ll be another minute,” Arnold said.

Izabel imagined the people wading through the ash. She imagined it giving way under people’s feet like a fine sand, like quicksand maybe, if it were deeper. She could see the masks on their faces, the large plastic glasses over their eyes, makeshift protection pieced together from a hardware store. Socks pulled up over the cuffs of their pants. Scarves around their necks maybe. All of them sweating through their search. What would they keep anyway, of what they found in the ash? And could they trust it? To be clean and safe?

Suddenly Izabel remembered her mother running her nails through Izabel’s hair when she was checking her for ticks. Izabel loved when she did that. She wanted her mother to run her fingers through her hair more often. Thinking back, Izabel didn’t know why she didn’t just ask her. She would have done it, Izabel thought.