It is. It is worse. What he sees makes him drop the camera, makes him run faster than before, as fast as he can.

Another girl. A fifth. Her eyes are still open. And they, too, are looking right at him.

This time, when he leaves, the rage takes over. It has tightened around his brain. He feels it spread down his spine, pressing on every inch of his skin. He kicks walls, dumpsters, cans. He buys another camera, but when he thinks about going back again he can’t, can’t face it, can’t get over his fear, his shame. The plastic feels so small, like a toy, and he stomps the new camera under his feet, rips the film between his hands. He feels, more than ever before, the limits of who he is like a cage, a shrinking room.

Though there is another way. He could draw it, he thinks. The way his grandmother taught him before he started school. He closes his eyes and wills himself, for a minute, to think about her patient hands, the way she guided him into making images of milk cartons, sandwiches, red apples, butterflies. Innocent, simple, beautiful things. She always seemed so pleased by his work, kissing him on the head when he finished pictures of dinners he hoped to eat, pictures of places he thought she might like to go. He had liked breaking down the world that way, into line and color and shade and feeling. Pictures came easier than words, which always felt cold and barren no matter how many he learned.

He starts with the easier parts—the sign with its setting sun, the letters he remembers: the letters that could be the name of the place, VACA CY, the square building perched on the edge of the road. Then, grass bending in the wind, the thick, dark mud. He comforts himself by drawing a heron in flight, putting off the work he knows he has to do next. That hair, tangled with muck. Those open, staring eyes. He sketches the outlines of them first: their hands, their bare feet. He knows it’s not important to the meaning of the drawing, but he feels he owes it to the women, to take the time to outline all fifty of their toes.