Sabertooth crouched. Rhino and Camel ripped branches for berries that blackened their tongues. Earth dervished on the business of planets. The eruption was merely due. When it came, Horse chewed on, blinked, as the sky thrilled black and tall for a thousand miles. Buzzard spied the tower-cloud coming, tipped her wings and flew fast south across many rivers and fat bodies of land, but wings fatigue and clouds do not. The air was full of tiny shards, microscopic glass, and these snowed down on all. Chickadee fell first, the most fragile webbing in the lungs, then Crane, who had flown straight through the cloud thinking oh, it is only a cloud, fell with his throat full, legs a tangled mound of ash. Rat keeled over from a bird’s nest he’d been raiding, an egg escaping from his paws when he fell, no mother to meet Chick when he hatched, no heat, no worm or regurgitated grub. In the few hours he lived, Chick thought the world was a gray and silent place and he its only inhabitant, his kingdom, all he would ever know, and he ruled it from high in his branch, good and fair to all. To him his life was long and full of interest, but for the chill on his naked bumpy skin and the unexplained pain in his belly, his eyes scanning the sky, his mouth panting open with vague expectation.

“Saul’s a goddamned lucky man,” Dan was saying.

“Hell, yes. Since Ella’s a fucking peach.”

Badger fell from a limb, Dog from a cliff, floated downriver.

For Horse, the pain was exquisite, long and thirsty. The Herd marched slow to the water hole. Mud was cool on their hooves, the only soothing possible. They nuzzled the foals, a small comfort for lives so short. Breathing was hard, got harder, more shards in each inhalation, more blood. Weeks went by. Bones decayed as the Herd swayed and waited, organs swelled and pressed into organs that pressed and overlapped and crushed each other, no other place to go, one side wins, the other subsides. It was one of those rare conjunctions of scale, when nature, for reasons of its own, takes time out from the routine of hatching life to make good and sure that a few beloved offspring have been well and truly annihilated.

“Ella, Ella,” he was saying, so—

Rhino was last to collapse, the biggest lungs, the grandest capillaries. From a distance his belly was a smooth round boulder.

“Why me?” he was saying.