The image of a gun spins in her personal darkness. Olympia thinks they should get one. She cites the thousand books she’s read and how guns have saved more than one character’s life. But Malorie has been strict on this from the beginning. The last thing she wants in this camp is a tool Tom might use in the name of progress. It’s not hard to imagine opening a cabin door and getting shot at by a pre-prepositioned rifle, as Tom prides himself on a triumphant invention. And, of course, it’s not only Tom she doesn’t trust with one. It’s any of them, in the event one should see something they shouldn’t.

Yet, here, now, it feels like something more than her sense of purpose and a sharp knife could be helpful.

She listens.

She smells.

She waits.

She has done these three things so often over the last ten years that she hardly remembers a time when she didn’t. Sometimes, her new-world behavior seeps into her memories of the old. Didn’t she sniff the air every time she entered Shannon’s bedroom as a child? Didn’t she ask Mom and Dad if their eyes were closed when they came home from the store?

There is no past and present behind the fold. No linear lines of any kind.

The beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and the searching stick under her arm, Malorie crosses the basement again and arrives at the stairs quicker than she thought she would.

She’s scared.

It’s not the nicest thing to realize. Because once it begins, once the initial, hot tendrils tickle your arms and legs, flow down your back and calves, it’s hard to stop the feeling from growing to its full size: panic.

She turns to face the open basement. Did something move deeper in as she came farther out? No man is down here. She believes Tom and Olympia are right that he left, because their ears have never let her down before.

But does something share this space with her?

She hears Tom the man begging to be let into the attic as she gave birth to, if not his son, his namesake.

The kids know the rules, yes. They know to keep still until she returns from her sweep. Unless, of course, there’s an emergency.

“Fuck you,” she says to the open space. To the creatures, too.

Because sometimes it helps.

Then she’s hurrying up the stairs just like she and Shannon used to do as kids. Cranberries or a book in hand, the girls would race, side by side, elbowing each other to get to the top first. Malorie remembers falling on the stairs once, scraping both elbows, seeing between the steps the face of her old stuffed Sylvester the Cat and taking the rest of the steps at a screaming run.