Peggy’s hands stop scrubbing and come to rest on the kitchen counter. She turns her head to stare down the ancient linoleum floor that just tried to fling her on her arse. For a moment, she is still. Swallowed up by a memory or an idea or the smell of Javex and the hypnotic hum of the bees in the pale-pink clusters of tiny roses outside the kitchen window.

“Nope,” she snaps, eyes flashing, aura receding. “Tell your own stories. You’re not getting off the hook for that, missy.” She flicks a handful of scrub water at me, her ample arms and face twitching to shift to something lighter than talk of death. “Listen, ya lazy brat. Got your hospital bag packed?”

“I’m not due for four weeks.” I bite into and promptly spit out a piece of Char’s horrendous excuse for a square. “The baby doctor said first-timers almost always go over.”

“Is that right, now?” she says. “Well, I don’t know what doctors think they know, but Charlotte keeps going on about the rose bush blooming early. Consider yourself warned.”

And right on cue, the little critter kicks my lung, pucks me in the bladder, and makes me piss myself just a little. So I go pack a hospital bag, just in case. Then I go outside to smell Mama’s roses, and see if maybe they’ll start telling me things I don’t already know. But all I hear is the industrious hum of bees getting ready to call it a day. And then, the grating whine of chainsaws, followed by a blood-curdling scream.

I expected to be dead by now. I assumed that by summer I’d have long since been Gem-Mortalized, resting in sparkly multi-faceted peace on Mama’s end table. I figured I’d have knocked a few easy items off my Fuck It Bucket List. Jotted down a few pages of memories, had some last laughs with my friends, dressed up like my trampy teenage self, and hauled the odd skeleton out of my family’s closet, just to waltz it around for everyone to see. But here I am, not dead, very pregnant, and going around in one of Peggy’s old floral muumuus. Mama would approve, no doubt. Only a streel would go around with a pregnant belly hanging halfway out of one of them tight tops, anyway. And now I’m pulling on a goddamn pair of rubber boots, slathering myself in homemade fly dope, and dragging my muumuu-clad pregnant arse out into the woods to find Char screeching her guts out at Sarah Spenser’s transplanted cowboy minions who’ve begun cutting down trees at the edge of my land.

Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that its exploratory permit has yet to wheedle its way through a series of bureaucratic snags. Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that there’s a conflicting application in the works, looking to have the back half of my property licensed as the Crann Na Beatha Cemetery, which would effectively stop anybody from disturbing the earth and the trees here for a few hundred years. Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that Char says she can hear the trees crying, pleading, as their friends, their lovers, their ancestors, their children are ripped to pieces by hired assassins. These boys have orders to clear the land. To make way for the carnage yet to come.