A human hand is easily recognizable, even with the flesh and skin eroded away. A hand is what makes us a primate, with its five digits; its muscles, ligaments, tendons, sheaths, arteries, and nerves; its twenty-seven bones. The fingers contain fourteen of those bones, the phalanges—distal, middle, and proximal—in each finger except for the thumb that has only two—the distal and proximal—and the most nerve endings in the body. That is, when the human attached to the hand is alive to feel.

This was a big hand. It was a hand with a silver ring still clinging to one finger.

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By the time Izzy had reached the exit, running from the thing she’d seen, her gut erupted.

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her hoodie and fell to her knees.

Izzy saw herself, walking through the desert with outstretched hands. In them, she held something, a gift of some kind. Whether to give or receive, she did not know. A coyote howled the blues. Or was it the devil himself singing? The sun came up, blood-ing her face, her hands, the gift. Dawn. Now even the morning light had become a terrible thing.

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There in a white room, blinded by sun through a window, Izzy saw a man hovering at her bedside, and she cried out for Cyrus.

It did not matter if she was dead. Cyrus was there. He had come back to her.

The sea, too, had come back. The cloudy, skinned water cleared, like a lasered eye, of the selenium that caused embryonic deformities in aquatic birds and fish. Pelicans, double-crested cormorants, egrets, ibis, ducks, geese, stilts, dowitchers, and avocets gathered at the shores. Alfalfa, Bermuda, and Sudan grass grew in abundance where there had once been only fields of white salt. The dust storms had subsided, the sulfuric stench of death been replaced by the sweet sugar beets; the bomb ghosts now rested in peace.

He stepped closer—shaved head and a beard.

This man was not Cyrus.

Cyrus had vanished.

“You scared us there,” Seth said, distantly.

She blinked her eyes at him. He gestured to a vase of sunflowers on the counter. “Hope you like.”

“What about Cyrus?” The sunflowers smelled bitter and the water was already sour with decay.

“You rest now.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days. Leanne told us what happened. Nephy sends her love.”

“What happened? Where’s my phone? Wait. What about Dog and Yard?”

“Your mom has them,” Seth said. He wasn’t looking at her but away, out the window. “Very, very big dog. Didn’t like me. He’s okay, though.”

Izzy called out for Cyrus again, repeating his name, and the nurse came and told Seth to leave.

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