If Queen had been there, we might have kneaded butter or watched the sunset from the warm boulder above the long house. We would have planned to ride the horses bareback to the waterfall, where I’d never been. She’d told me there was a place where you could stand right and see the rainbow all around you in every direction.

I kept trying with Sara. I desperately wanted to ask if the rebirth meant I couldn’t participate in the upcoming action. But I was too nervous to ask and hear her say no. Instead, I said, “What do you like about the fall?”

“I like being near Dice,” she said. And then a long pause.

“Well,” I said, “at least it’s nice to sit down to work.”

“I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to,” she said. She showed me the big gash she had on her thigh, the result of a kick from a nervous, mastitis-infected cow. “A weeping wound,” she called it. I got those words stuck in my head. Weeping wound.

“I wish Pear were here to fix that up for you,” I said. Sara gave me a hard look and turned away.

After lunch, Sunny came toward me. “Harmony, come help me get dinner,” he said. He had a bony, angled face, sharp cheeks, sharp chin. I thought he meant to town, and my heart began to beat. “Roadkill,” he explained.

We took a green wheelbarrow and walked forty-five minutes down the gravel path to the chalk-blue road. The air nipped at my bare neck.

We continued a few miles down the road. A car passed every ten minutes, headlights making the dark afternoon look even darker.

“There!” I said, pointing out some animal remnant squashed flat on the dotted yellow line. Sunny and I approached.

“Poor varmint,” said Sunny. “A sorry sight.” The animal had been gray, maybe a cat or a raccoon. It looked like we’d have to peel it off the asphalt with a spatula. “There’ll be better ones.”

The sun sank below the cloud cover, lighting up the whole sky a monstrous orange-brown. As we crested a hill, Sunny spotted a dead deer on the road’s shoulder. He bent down low over the creature, showed me the fleas still hopping on her fur.

“We always look for fleas. Fleas are for the living. They won’t stick around on a long-dead corpse.”

Blood rimmed the deer’s mouth, but still I was afraid that we would wake her as we hauled her into our barrow. We took turns pushing her back up the hill, back toward the woods.

“Sunny,” I said, “do you think they’ll find Queen?”

“Hope so.”