I woke to Paco’s little face hovering above mine. With great concentration, he spooned a kind of gelatin out of a clay saucer and held it to my mouth. It was steamy hot and cinnamon smelling, so much like America and diners and Cinnabon I wanted to cry. I swallowed some. It was sweet and warm and so fucking delicious.

“What is this?”

“A dessert. From the feet of the cow. Pregnant women like it.”

“The cow is dead?”

“Sí.”

Framed by our hut’s open door, Omar stood facing us. Evening light filtered in through the dark green pulsing rectangle. How long had I been sleeping?

“She got out,” Omar said. “Something got to her in the field. We think a fer-de-lance. Everybody ran to help her but it was too late. The women are working on her now. We’ll have to smoke the meat all night. I have to go help soon.”

In this place, you never named something that you would one day eat, but privately I called her Bella. It was true, giving her a name made her loss harder to bear. I pictured her sweet, dopey face, long lashes shading big brown eyes. As I pushed myself to a seated position, I noticed my dress had been lifted up to just above my knee, revealing an infected mosquito bite. But I knew then that it was something worse than that. The bite had craterized, widened, formed a crust around the edges. The itch was gone, replaced by a pulsing pain that reached deep into my flesh.

Omar pulled a stool close to me and sat by my side, his face stricken in a way I had never seen before. All the light gone from it, his lips a colorless line. Cavernous shadows dwelled under his eyes. He looked like an old man.

He gently touched the circle of redness that radiated out around the bite, the skin still purple from iodine. “How long have you had this one? This wasn’t here when I left.”

I pulled the cloth down to cover myself. “I don’t know.”

“Paco, leave us awhile, okay?”

Paco looked to me; I nodded in agreement with Omar. His little face drawn, he took his time gathering himself to leave.

“Listen to me, Lily. FrannyB was here. She looked at this.”

“While I was asleep?”

“Do you have any more of these on your body anywhere?”

Of course I did. The gloomy walls of the hut closed in. Something rustled in the thatched roof.

“What difference does it make? I’m taking care of them with the iodine, like FrannyB told me to.”

“Turn around and show me your back. I don’t like the way the skin looks by your neck. Pull your dress down and let me see.” His voice boomed; I felt his fierce strength above me, my complete helplessness.

He reached up toward the ties at the neck of my dress. I pushed his hand away. Realized: I and only I had gotten myself in this deep. In the silence that followed his command, I began to acknowledge the strange, faint voice that had been telling me something was terribly wrong with my skin, and had been for a while. “I need to see you,” he said more softly this time.