The fire came. Some man screamed—She’s alive!—and they lifted her into a truck. Come along unless you want to be burned alive. I want to be burned alive. I want you to burn me up with Matt.

First she thought they had: burning, freezing, lungs aching for air, a sound like ocean waves. Only slowly did she realize that the ocean waves came from a machine making her breathe, in, out, until someone said, She’s going to make it, she’s breathing on her own, but then when she tried to sit up, her head had been stuffed full of cotton.

Gertrude Perec, Nathan’s secretary, liked to tell about the time her mother filled banana skins with cotton and glued them together so carefully they looked untouched. Then she handed them out to people as a joke. My head is a banana skin sewn full of cotton.

That was CheeseNuts, but she didn’t realize it until much later, of course. CheeseNuts had filled her head with lithium. He agreed with Nathan that she had dreamed up the whole scene at the silo. Vivid imagination turning into delusions. They’d all tut-tutted sadly, even Shirley, looking at her with a malevolent eye that said, You lost. You didn’t know you were in a race, and you’re already so far behind you might as well give up.

Why should I give you or Nathan or CheeseNuts the satisfaction of putting my obsession aside? she said to Randy. No one tells you that memorizing every variety of grass in the Midwest is exhausting. No one tells CheeseNuts what an imbecile he sounds like when he starts talking about terroir and how 1883 was the best year for horse piss but 1992 was better for cow manure.

When she read the legal notice—three years old by the time she saw it—that old itch came over her. She had to get out to the land, see that his grave was secure. She’d hitched a ride partway, walked the rest of the way. Not so bad when you didn’t have a job you had to get up for, you could spend a night walking those country roads.

The sun was coming up when she finally got there, and Sonia could see that it was worse than she’d thought. A fence slicing through the graveyard, plants—corn or alfalfa or some stupid farm crop. And then like some nightmare, there was the Magpie, hopping along, stealing the seeds. She was older, and her hair was bleached so it looked like strings.

You shouldn’t bleach your hair. The chemicals make it ropy, Sonia said, and the Magpie said, Who the fuck are you?

Some men were with the Magpie, of course—there were always men with her—and they laughed and said, Who is that?