They did it.

Dorothy gets up and closes the door. She puts a hand on the wall, and then crosses two steps to put a hand on the opposite wall. The very tips of her fingers shake. In summer, the trailer heats up. It’s like living in a microwave.

They’ll never get the smell of fat and blood out of the RV. They’ve never gotten any of the other smells out of it. It still stinks like old scrambled eggs, like cooking chili, like the jalapeños Dorothy puts in her grilled cheese. It smells like combined sweat, and the strawberry milk she drank when she was six.

How would it be, to live in a ten-by-twenty-five-foot trailer, with a man who knew everything?

Dorothy opens the window just a crack. She hears Elaine offer to take off to the neighbors and ask for their tractor. Dad is straddling the King’s stomach, his legs spread just above its slit belly. Dorothy has to wonder exactly how old their Viper is, how much it had seen and felt, and how long it had buried itself beneath cool earth or glittered under a peaceful sun, how long it went undisturbed before they took an interest in disturbing it.

Dorothy hasn’t had anything to eat. Her shoulders ache. Her hands are still shaking. She takes a piece of sourdough bread, one of the last two in the pack that haven’t gone moldy yet, and puts it in the toaster.

Dad took her to the Grand Canyon once, and they went out on the skywalk. Dorothy was nine years old, scared and determined not to be. But something shifted when they got to the platform’s edge and she could lean against the railing and see the ground fall away red beneath her. She realized that if she put her foot on that railing she could hoist herself right over the glass guard wall. Her stomach absolutely ached with the knowledge that she was a metal rail and a bent knee away from being dead, and Dorothy identified in herself for the first time that instinct for the worst-case scenario, which claims that a ledge, once found, must be leapt from.

Once, she looked it up. It’s called the high-place phenomenon. It means, supposedly, having increased sensitivity to danger, not wanting to die.

When her toast pops out of the toaster, she jumps.

There are still chunks of fat floating in the pan, the rest going toward a faintly golden liquid. It shivers when Dorothy touches the bread to it. The crust comes away glittering, and Dorothy does not allow herself to look at it long before she puts it in her mouth.

She pulls her hand back very quickly, and the rest of the bread flies across the trailer. It’s hot. She sticks her head under the sink like a dog and gulps water.

Dorothy stands.

Perhaps she spat all the fat out, perhaps she did not swallow anything, and her life is still intact and narrow.