She wanted me to tell her what I’d felt. I wasn’t sure I could find words for it, but I tried. This one felt like popping buttons off a shirt, I said. Those were claws scuttling around my womb. That was like custard turning thick on the stove.

One time a bird got trapped inside our trailer, knocking its beak like crazy against the windows even though we had the door wide open. I felt sorry for it. I couldn’t understand why it was stupid enough to stay. It was moving so fast it gave off heat, like a little lightbulb covered in feathers. You ever feel a bird heart under the ribs? I asked Fiona. It was gunfire knocking against toothpicks. I want it out, she said, and smacked it with a broom so hard it died. She wasn’t the same woman that I’d met by the ocean.

I got pregnant during the summer. Armpit summers, Fiona called them, because it felt like her whole body was inside one. Some people call it dry heat. Fuck that. It doesn’t let you stay dry anywhere, leaves you sweating all over everything.

Late in June, I spent the night with an asshole in Reno who kicked me out with no shower. He insisted we do it on the carpet because he didn’t want to sleep in a dirty bed afterward. I left him buck-naked on his clean sheets and found myself waiting for a bus before dawn. His dried-up cum was peeling off my skin, crispy as doughnut glaze in my belly button.

It got hot fast, soon as the sun rose. I was sweating all over the bus seat, thighs smearing the rubber like buttered toast. I could smell my own cunt, which I liked because it was mine. I thought about that man’s face—the way his cheeks shook back and forth, all wobbling and red—and it made me so sick I ran up the aisle. The driver was a big guy with a visor, sipping a Slurpee. I tapped his shoulder and told him to stop, swallowing as hard as I could. I pointed at my stomach in case he didn’t get it.

He said, “Lady, we’re on the highway.”

I said, “You want this happening on the bus or off it?”

He pulled onto the shoulder, and I bent over the tar. The heat burned my knees when I knelt. I got the mess of vomit all over my teeth. It was pudding made of fever. What if someone drove by and thought I was praying?

I got back on the bus, and everyone was shooting me dirty looks. I was just another slut with a hangover. But the driver turned out to be a decent guy. He gave me some melted gum from his pocket and a little bell off the dashboard. “Next time you need a stop,” he said, “just ring it.”

One time I’d gotten sick and Lucy gave me a little metal chime shaped like a triangle. “Ring it anytime,” she said. “I don’t want you getting up.”