“All my things,” she concluded. “I’ve lost them,” and she went through the list of the missing for the driver, and how she and her sister had once been close but now were hardly speaking. Now when they spoke, they spoke only of the girl and the bear. The girl and the bear were a code: a way to communicate when speech was impossible. The driver understood fine. Ella could see that fine. The way he nodded, his hands on the steering wheel saying and asking her without asking (another code) to Please go on, tell me more. And she did: When the bear was young. Ambitions. Rate of copulation. Slid snow on his belly, a toboggan. Yes, Joy, he was full of it, and grief too. Was necessity to him. The propensity. Outside and inside, Ella explained. Implication of thrusts, of fires, of cave paintings duly changed.

The driver lit a match and smoked. She took the cigarette from his mouth and smoked it down, set it back in his lips.

“The end,” she said.

The pickup rolled forward to the curve and around it. It drove for miles, very slowly. She talked of Eve next, since it was not the end yet, mother of all the world, since every woman can trace her line back to this apple eater, friend of snakes, birther of birth and death both.

The truck pulled over. The hazards blinked in indecision.

“Let me out,” she said as if she’d planned it.

The door swung open. She was out. A deer in the road. A piece of chalk. The End. The End.

The truck inched forward to go on about its life without her. He would tell a few people who would tell a few what he’d seen and heard this night. All would be well if he told enough of them. The owls watched in the branches, the separate plane of birds, their clock-faced faces following Ella trotting north now, their heads ticking degree by degree with Ella’s strobe of movement in taillights, then none when the truck skidded off. The owls invented Ella just as she had invented owls in her busy life, tawny and vivid, wise or wall-eyed, neat tucked feathers as a rule, wings reaching as needed to hoist the owl into the air—a flying owl, a swooping owl—and the owls made Ella vivid and tawny, more round-legged than themselves, taller, with slender pathetic wings pumping as she ran toward takeoff. She ran better with only owls watching. She ran over the center line, swerving reckless, a new trait in herself she would prize.

“Where are you?” Ella called into a slice of sky. “Take care of all those lovely critters for me, sister dear. I did my very best to catch you, you know!”