“I’m not sure,” she said, tilting the udder. The cow licked its blue nose. “But Dice has performed many miracles.” She paused. “He got me off drugs, right when I thought I would die. I was at the end of the line.” She was distant, thoughtful. “He heals without fake-world medicine.”

This reminded me that I needed to go to a store. “Is there a car around? Can you take me?”

Queen said, “Why would you want to leave, when we have everything we need?”

“I’m going to get my period soon,” I said.

“We don’t have to leave for that.”

“I’d love to pick up a few other things,” I said. I craved so many foods, foods I planned to steal or eat right at the cash register: Peach Looza. Coconut water, the sugary, viscous kind filled with white cubes of pulp. Chocolate chip cookies, lined up in a plastic rib cage. I was going to put lotion all over my raw hands. “Come on,” I said. “Dice didn’t mention any rules about errands.”

“Most of the women here can’t get their periods anymore,” Queen said. I was surprised. Everyone on the farm seemed young.

Instead of a trip to town, she brought me to the storage house and pulled out a cookie tin. She showed me the little rubber cups for the most of it, and special store-bought soap to clean the cups, and then reusable pads with snaps on the wings, hand-sewn out of novelty fabrics, dogs flying airplanes, dancing skeletons, to hide stains. We could dump our blood in the humanure wooden toilet box and cover it with sawdust, like anything else, she told me. “Listen,” Queen said. “They’re not going to be straightforward with you about whether you can go to town. They’ll say, ‘Why would you want to leave, when what you’re looking for is right here?’ ”

I thought back—Dice had said that; Queen had, a minute ago.

“I’ve learned it’s better not to ask,” Queen said. “Sometimes you might go, accompanied,” she said. “They don’t like it when we leave. If you try to leave, they follow you. And then if they think you’ve closed off, they do this thing called a rebirth.”

I wondered if she was speaking from experience. “What’s a rebirth?” I said.

“It’s a ceremony,” she said. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Dice wants to keep the family together, that’s all. And if we’re open enough, we’ll be able to fix the world. It sounds crazy,” she said, “but we’ve all seen this light around him, he glows a little bit.”