The old roof groaned and metal squealed. My hands flew up stupidly to cover my head as I cowered on the bench, sure the roof would come down on us. The china cups rattled on their saucers, dark liquid sloshing up over the rim of the full one. The one that had been meant for Trey.

The heaving earth beneath us stilled. The roof had held. I sat on my bench, blinking in the sudden silence. There had been birdsong all around us, but I had not realized it until they went so quiet.

I could not understand. I looked to Coral, and her face had changed. The afghan had fallen to the floor, and I saw that her hidden hand clutched a small black metal box. Sorrow and ecstasy were at war across her features. Her nostrils flared. Her skin was very red now. She coughed.

“It’s done,” she rasped, so voiceless that I read the words off her lips more than I heard them. “God, it hurts. It hurts me.”

She tipped forward then, landing on her knees in front of her bench, a strangling sound coming from her mouth.

I stood up, blinking, stupid as a cow. “I don’t understand.” My voice sounded trapped inside my head. I didn’t want to understand. Robert? I didn’t want to understand.

I heard Trey’s voice, tinny and faint, screaming my name from very far away. I looked down the hill. He was out of the car, his face a featureless white disk turned up toward us.

Coral was heaving now, writhing and gurgling, her skin reddening in a frightening crimson blush. Then I was running without knowing or remembering when my feet had started moving. I banged into the stampeding unicorns on the arm of another of the heavy wooden benches, and sharp pain bit into my thigh and hip. I shoved myself away and kept on going, leaping off the platform, sprinting around the edge of the carousel. A plume of gray smoke was pillaring up into the blue, blue sky, high above the trees.

I ran around the carousel and toward it, through what used to be the gold mine, my feet sinking in mounds of still-soft earth that filled the framed boxes. I could see an orange glare growing up and ahead of me.

I reached the woods, and I realized I was screaming. It was a word, this scream. The word was “Robert!” and this made no sense. I didn’t want it to make sense. I could not stop screaming for him, stumbling up a steep slope through the trees, screaming in the wake of that, screaming into the stink of chemical-burn smoke rising in front of me, a black column marking an altar.