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.

“It's some kind of instinct,” Ruth said. She hadn't seen a tarantula in months, but she thought about them all the time, pictured their fuzzy legs in perpetual motion. What was the chemistry driving their built-in sexual clocks? Did they, like Ruth, regret the distances love required?

“What kind?” Allen asked, but she didn't answer. Ruth put her hand on her belly. Her baby's hand pushed back against it, hard, like it needed her attention, like it had something important to tell her.

RUTH CAME HOME TO see Del sitting in a folding chair outside the trailer. His short-sleeved gray coveralls were unzipped above his belt so that Ruth could see a sunburn on a V-shaped strip of his pale chest. He hadn't gotten that underground.

“Something happen at work today?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.

“Things ain't gonna work out at the mine,” Del said.

“So let's go home.” She felt the baby squirming. Maybe now it could be born in Greeley, in the same hospital she and Del had been born in. Her mother would knit a hat. Mano would paint its portrait. Sister would coo at the wrinkled newborn, fill its ears with whispered blessings.