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On the way back home, Izzy couldn’t breathe. Stench and silt were in her lungs. So, she pulled over at Mecca Beach. A sign read, “Salton Sea State Recreation Area.” No one at the booth, so she just drove up and parked, got out. No one anywhere. A strange apocalyptic light. Caustic, as if it had burned those fish to death right through the water.

“Come on,” she told herself. “Get some fresh air.” She laughed grimly. The breeze—so slight it hardly ruffled the surface of the lake—stank of rotten fish.

The sponge-and-crunch beneath Izzy’s feet felt lunar—crumbled tilapia bones and hollow-eyed carcasses. The sea stretched out to the horizon, opaque in the sun like a dead eye.

This place is so fucked up. It never seemed so fucked up to me before.

She bent over, trying to catch her breath again. Trying not to vomit. Her skin like a cloak of a thousand clams. What had just happened?

Extinct animals. A glass box. Flowers made of tears.

Where was Cyrus? Izzy walked back to the truck feeling the sickening crunch, the gaze of hollow eyes at her feet. Dead fish had been piled up in the center of a circle of carefully placed carcasses—as if done with intention.

The sun had started to set over the water.

She turned away from the mandala of fish bones. The eye sockets seemed to be looking southwest, the jawbones gaping in that direction. Maybe there was a clue somewhere closer to home.

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Izzy stood in the doorway, surveying the shack. Yard peeked up at her, then disappeared into his shell, as if he knew what she was about to do. He didn’t like too much noise or movement. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

“At least it doesn’t smell like dead fish here,” she said aloud. At least there weren’t dead fish bones arranged in a hellish circle on the floor. But she had to face Cyrus’s clothing, and the sense of loss they might stir up frightened her, too.

Izzy opened the closet. She took out all of Cyrus’s clothes and placed them on the bed. Each item old and worn but clean. The red and black plaid wool flannel that smelled like a wet dog when it rained; the black polished cotton button-down dress shirt; the short-sleeved, pale green plaid button-down he wore in the summer, the fabric thinning slightly at the shoulders. The Levi’s denim jacket, the khaki Dickies jacket, the down parka, the black hoodie, the black gabardine suit he’d found at the Goodwill. He could lock his phone but not his pockets. She went through each one; all of the pockets were empty.

She opened his dresser drawer and took out his jeans and T-shirts. Unlike her clothes, that tended to get easily tumbled about when she searched for something, his all stayed neatly folded. She shook out his black and white cotton, short-sleeved T-shirts and his long-sleeved winter thermals. She slid her fingers into the pockets of his jeans. When she poked a finger into the little front pocket, she felt a twinge of desire, remembering how she liked to touch him that way, pretending to be searching for things—change, a missing key. He’d laugh and say, “I feel something here,” placing her hand on his fly and she’d unzip him, take him out—No, no time for that now.