A WEEK PASSED. RUTH was sweeping the fossil pavilion at the end of the day when she felt her belly contract and harden, felt the heat in her arms and legs drain inward, concentrate into the boulder her womb had become. She tried to lean on the broom, to stay upright, but couldn't manage it. She dropped into a squat and linked her elbows around the bends of her knees. She closed her eyes, blowing out hard, emptying all her air, waiting for this wave of pain to pass. The broom slapped the floor, the sharp initial sound softening into gentle echoes that intertwined with the rhythm of her panting. The effect was not unlike radio static. Her left hand gripped the ichthyosaur's fossilized eye socket.

“Allen,” she said. It came out as a whisper. She grunted, trying to force her voice back into her throat, trying to muster a shout. She thought of her kids, at home in the trailer in Gabbs, felt relief they weren't with her. She staggered herself out of the pavilion, into the gathering dusk. “Allen!”

And then she was alone in the throes of another contraction. Her ears were full of the tidal rushings of her own blood, of her amniotic fluids, all her salty marine internals muting the outside world. She was inside her own head now, focused. The pain moved from her womb to her lower back. She felt the baby flip inside her. This she had not felt before, not with the others. She tried to morph her screams into a level, steady keening. She imagined her breath catching her pain, imagined the way both breath and pain would leave her, diffuse into the air around her, the way she would have to breathe them both back into herself.

She felt the baby turn again, and the pain moved back into her belly. Her pelvic muscles felt alive, as though each fiber was moving individually and at cross-purposes to the others, like a writhing pile of mating snakes. She was overwhelmed by her desire to bear down, to push into the earth's gravity. The baby would not wait for safety. Ruth wanted, more than anything, her sisters, but she wanted also, just a little bit, Del.

Ruth caught the sliver of new moon surrounded by wispy, long clouds. Ruth tried to name them. Cirrus? Cumulus? She couldn't pin them down, and if the angels were gossiping with her dead ancestors about her current predicament, she didn't want to know. The stars were coming in bright against the darkening skyline but seemed in motion, as if they were being drawn in real time by frantic Spirograph. Bad enough the other children had to be from Vegas. This baby would be from nowhere, a ghost-town baby, born on top of a fossil. She could not take back any of the decisions that had led her here. This is where she found herself, so this is where her baby would be born.