Detroit was far away too. Poverty and oppression always distanced itself in the US, like it had been brought from somewhere else, could only be compared to somewhere else, somewhere Third. But this was how the American experiment started, this was all it ever was. Dune’s thinking cut a rough smile over her face, feeling comfort in this Vivian type of thought: dialectical humanism, the reverb of capitalism, the boomerang of smallpox.

Dune peeked at the fire before her, and saw a black wetness that turned her stomach before she looked back to the sky. Dune had watched every moment of her mother’s cremation, the way the skin had undone itself in the heat. She’d inhaled the strange smells of hair and skin becoming sky.

She never needed that experience again. Once the fire sounded solid and internal, she stepped back, looking everywhere else.

“Don’t leave me,” she thought then, unsure to who. Then she begged aloud, to everyone who was long gone, “Don’t leave me.”

She stepped further back and then went inside the house, moving from one undoable task to another.

When she’d returned to add broken chair legs to the fire half an hour later, it had been popping with muscles and fat. Tomorrow, amongst the coals, there would be bones. Once they cooled, she would recover what she could and create an altar of bones in Mama Vivian’s room.

She couldn’t get warm in the empty house. She went to the basement, bringing Mama Vivian’s afghan from the living room for her lap. She held her elbows and rested her head on the edge of the model of Detroit. The syndrome was everywhere, as slow and persistent as the green mold growing outwards all around her model house.

She cried on and off, raining on the edge of the city, a little pool. She didn’t tell her father that his mother was dead. It felt too obvious.

“Perhaps I should burn this too,” she thought. Perhaps to rise from its own ashes, Detroit needed a cleansing fire ritual. She didn’t quite sleep, but she dreamt.

Dune was walking down the middle of the street. It had rained, it was gray everywhere, but she could see rainbows in each of the puddles. Her house was a few blocks down and her family was in front, Kama, Brendon and Vivian, playing a game where they were chasing each other. Playing. She wanted to play. She felt her child-self opening up in her system.

Dune started to run towards them and jumped in the first puddle, felt it splash up around her. The world was gray but the water had a million colors in it. She ran and splashed through the next puddle, and then ran and jumped up even higher and smashed down into the next puddle—but the puddle had no bottom and she was inside it, falling through the bright water, falling so deeply.