“That's a smart kid,” Allen said. “Can you start tomorrow?”

Ruth sent a small prayer of gratitude to St. Christopher then, for Allen's kindness to her boy, for the job she needed, that nobody, so far, was suffering toothache or other pestilence. Ruth's eyes followed her children's fragile limbs as they stretched and contracted into the landscape.

RUTH WAS AN UNLIKELY state parks employee. After a few months on the job, her pregnant belly stuck out so far she tore a small hole in her sweater's seam. Everything about her was poorly suited for the environment. The February wind blew steady and unpleasant, pinning the flared legs of her park uniform against her shins. She climbed into the cab of the truck for relief, pulled a stocking cap over her hair. Desert sand made its way through the knit of her wool socks.

Allen cracked the driver-side door. “Ruth? You okay in there?”

“Just wanted a break from the wind,” she said. “I'm fine.”

“You need me to call Del?”

“He's probably not home.”

She had taken Sister's advice, lied to Del about her wages. She was adding to her creamed corn can every two weeks, praying to St. Christopher for the journey back home. Allen looked at her for a long time, shook his head, went back to work.

Ruth tried to bend down to remove her shoes, but the child in her womb moved in protest, pressing down on her bladder just enough for a small amount of urine to release, to leave a wet spot on her panties. She felt one of the child's limbs extend down farther than it should, passing what she felt must be the barrier between belly and leg. The pain was sharp. Ruth felt as though she was being peeled from the inside, as though the membranes holding her together would hang now, stripped and useless, from her muscle and bone. Ruth drew in a quick breath and held it, waiting, willing the pain to spread out from her pelvis and into her knees, to make her arms shake and weaken. She wanted the pain to be brief but all-encompassing, to have her body store the memory of it, to practice. This child would come anytime now, and she needed to prepare herself, to be ready for the familiar ways it would rip her apart.

The final chore of every workday required sweeping the pavilion that held the ichthyosaur fossils, dinosaur reptilians that swam well but had to surface to breathe. Ruth struggled to discern the fossil outline in the assortment of rocks and boulders in the display, even though she'd seen Allen's presentation for park visitors a million times, watched him map the skeleton by pointing to various areas on a small toy dolphin. She could not identify the creature's backbone, could not tell its skull from its feet, but she felt a deep ache of empathy for this poor animal, sunk for all eternity into the sand, everything cool and familiar having evaporated, the world dried-up, unrecognizable, tarantulas migrating annually over its bones.