“For everything to die?”

“Maybe. I know we’re being punished.”

“Maybe you are,” Jamey said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You drive a car.”

I spoke up from my mug. “She can’t drive, Dance.”

No one else was in the park. No other fires lit up the darkness. Shadows settled in around us like they were there to stay.

I couldn’t hear dripping from the shower house anymore. Maybe the pipes had finally frozen after giving us one last fill-up of our bottles and jugs, one last good clean. No rushing sound from the creek that surely cut through the woods somewhere. Maybe its bends were clotted and stilled, fish frozen like shirts on a line. I wondered if the rabbits and groundhogs were alive in their burrows. If the black bears, which had been seen crossing the river in seasons past, had made it, noses white from the icy Ohio, holding their faces above the waterline like a bundle of everything they owned.

I had seen barges on the Ohio: coal topped with snow, little mountains returning to mountains. Were they stuck there, wedged in bergs and flows? Would that coal ever heat anything? Was it all for nothing?

“I fucking recycled,” Jamey said. “I collected all the empties in that damn place. We only ate meat we killed or raised. I wasn’t old enough to vote before. How is any of this my fault?”

The men were silent for a moment. The fire popped, sending a flare into the sky.

“Well,” Grayson said. “You have a kid.”

“That,” Jamey said, “ain’t my fault, either.” She stood up, the blanket crumpling to the ground.

“Overpopulation,” Dance said.

“Leave it, guys,” I said.

Jamey dumped the rest of her mug into the fire. It was careless. We needed the heat. But the blaze only sizzled and kept on burning, and she walked away, mumbling something about checking on Starla.

“What’s the matter with her?” Grayson asked when she had gone.

“She’s fucking fifteen,” I said.

“Jesus.”

Silence again, heavier this time. Nobody wanted to break it. We watched the fire fizzle and snap.

I used to love a campfire. It used to be a treat, hot dogs roasting in the lower field. Or a bonfire: an excuse to burn the autumn cuttings and cast-offs—the telltale evidence, branches and leaves that had to be disposed of somehow. I thought of camping trips with Lisbeth’s youth group, the boys fighting over who would strike the flint, all of them getting the kindling wrong, freezing, waiting for s’mores, finally eating the chocolate bars raw. The boys teased Lisbeth when the fumes drifted over to her lawn chair: Smoke follows beauty... They never teased me. And never, ever let me strike the flint.