Sara and Sunny described the tasks for the day. “Haying time,” Sara said. “Who wants to come?” No one volunteered at first, so I raised my hand, thinking of my rebirth. The family members nodded congenially at me, though just two days ago they’d torn me apart.

I raked while Sunny drove the mower that cut down the spindly stalks of alfalfa, timothy, and orchard grass, which grew all over the slopes. We let the hay dry in the fields, then the next day we raked it into long snaking piles, windrows. We pitchforked the windrows up onto the horse-drawn wagon. The horses brought the wagon up to the highest part of the barn, up the ramp that couldn’t support a tractor, and then we forked the hay down to the loft in loose piles.

The raking—that was the hell, hot, strenuous, and dusty, endless. I couldn’t, hard as I tried, become a mountain lion or a sheep and focus only on my purpose. Most modern farms had a mechanical swather to do the job, and a tedder to turn the hay for drying, but we couldn’t afford those luxuries. Pear was dead, and Queen was gone, and no thank you, I have already been saved.

I wished I could wheel time backward, before the rebirth, before the miscarriage, Rainer and Queen falling away from each other, Queen stepping down the ladder, ungritting her teeth. Before Rainer and Lindsay came, back to the winter, when all I worried about was when Bay would touch me again.

I thought I could see the family clearly now, see the good and bad. The bad was that Pear had died, though there was no definite self, I knew. And the good was everything else. The good was nighttime breath in the long house like frothing waves, the nicotiana, pawpaws, and cardoons, the moths fluffing themselves dry of dishwater, the fugueing tunes and fire on cold nights, the slamming rain and Earth history and huge plates of ice we found in the winter with silvery leaf impressions frozen into them. The good was the mountain lion with leaf-green eyes shouldering through the woods, even though they were supposed to be extinct. The good was the little owl who’d hurtled out the window.

And besides, down in the deep, I knew that I was trapped. Trapped good and proper. If death was the worst outcome, well, that was true for everyone on Earth; weren’t we all trapped? Get relativity. We raked the hay. We forked the piles into the wagon. We drove the hay up the highest ramp of the barn, forked it down. The barn’s top levels filled to the rafters with hay, which smelled like a lover’s hair—Bay’s in particular. When the wind blew in, the chaff rose in a flickering mass. We worked until we could hardly stand. I wondered if my exhaustion would satisfy the family.