She presses her nose against the wide, boxy window that looks out over the road, over the farm opposite, brackets a view of the horizon.

Dorothy sees that one of the cows in the next field is pregnant. She sees the fetus curled inside it, its pink, alien body translucent and veined with dark blood, the flat moonstone of its underdeveloped eye. She sees the knotted hair network of the corn roots beneath the ground, and the deep, wide tunnel that the Viper’s body cut far beneath them. She sees, and shies away from, the long, cool mass of its life, its hundreds of years of slow knowledge, its enormity of consciousness and simplicity of thought, knowing without interest, without analysis. The world spreads out in front of Dorothy, flat and shimmering and somehow small.

She knows that Elaine and Dad sat up all night, after she fell asleep, that they drank coffee and beer, that Dad took a cigarette from her even though he doesn’t smoke because he liked the sinewy lines of her arms, and thought about asking her to dinner and how he didn’t have any place to ask her. And she knows that Elaine would have said no, though she would have said it nicely, and that Dad didn’t ask anyway, because when he told Elaine that just one person could taste the fat, she shrugged one of her sharp shoulders and said, “I guess I know a thing or two more than I ever needed to anyway.” Dad liked her less after that, he liked her a lot less.

And Dorothy knows why that is, because she looked so certain while she said it, the light glancing off the hard edges of her eyes. Dad has never known what to do with people who are anything but discontented in the boundaries of their lives. She knows that Elaine would have said no because she’s discovered she likes to be alone more than she likes to be not alone, and that she discovered that after she caught her husband with his brother’s wife in her shower, but she got the farm out of it so she could mind more than she does.

She sees that her 1,870 is actually only 73, and that she had been within ten miles of one of them, once, when she was eleven. His name is Stuart, but he is in Canada now, with his dad, looking for Bigfoot. Only 73, and now 0, because this last experience is hers alone.

She knows who her mother is, that her name is Amy Dorsett and that she got pregnant when she was seventeen and her boyfriend Bill, nearly twenty-one, offered her $7,000, every cent he had plus more than a little he stole from the parents, to have the baby, because he wanted it—he wanted it so badly. Dorothy knows that her father sat beside her mother in the hospital while she was being born and squeezed both his shaking hands between his knees and cried, because he was afraid his daughter would not be born alive, and that when she was he looked at her little red crinkled nose and paid every cent of the seven thousand and left town the next day in case Amy changed her mind, even though Dorothy knows that Amy never did, because he wanted her so badly.