Queen returned from the barn, the blood rusting beneath her nails. We mixed crusty honey into our cups and drank our sweet milk, which was as thick on the tongue as Elmer’s glue. Dry cream, Queen called it, dense from the wintertime hay. In the spring when the grass came up the cream would turn golden yellow and we’d be swimming in its quantity, though the cows would begin excreting waste so profusely that we’d have to muck out the stable every day instead of once a week. “But then, the cream!” Queen said. “Pure sunshine.”

The dawn and the hot drink put us in high spirits. From behind the storage house, we could see the long view out of the folded holler—the gentle, timeworn mountains, half a billion years old and once as tall as the Himalayas, once four miles tall in places. We saw the low blue fog soften and illuminate the slopes beyond our slopes—the Smokies. There were certain times of day or night that always felt magical to me here on the farm. Here, now, five a.m. You can stay three days or the rest of your life. This wasn’t the kind of place you could pick up and put down. We were not allowed to have anything, not even our own memories, really. Our bodies were not ours. We lived low and close to the earth. Dice wanted our lives to be unabstract.

It was inconceivable to me now that there were places out in the world called things like “the Container Store.” In fact, the name the Container Store struck me as so absurd I was sure I’d made it up. The sun was coming up and for the first time in months it felt warm.

“I feel bad for the people who can’t see this,” I said. “Like my mom.” I wanted to see what she would say, even though I knew we weren’t supposed to dwell on the past.

“You know Gemini’s dad actually found him in Mars Hill?” Queen said. “He had a whole search crew, they tried to grab him! But Gemini’s shirt was so old they tore it right off him. They ended up with scraps in their hands. He came back up without a shirt on and we all laughed for days.” I imagined my mother trying to tear off my clothes at Mars Hill. Reaching for her daughter, failing. “I thought about leaving, once,” Queen said. She looked around to make sure we were alone. “That was before I knew that people who leave often die out there.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.