Calliope’s gut lurched. She nearly asked, You talked to Phoenix? as if that were possible. Her son was not a coyote. She remembered a bit of apocrypha about American physicist Richard Feynman, who’d worked on the bomb. He was called to his wife Arline’s deathbed and hitchhiked from Los Alamos. It was 1945, weeks away from Hiroshima. The nurse recorded the time of death: 9:21 p.m. After mourning and making arrangements, leaving the room and returning, Feynman looked to the clock on the wall. 9:21. The hands frozen. Had the universe taken notice of his loss? Had time stopped for his grief? Could he believe for even a moment that his love had turned the world peculiar, that his wife had returned, a ghost he didn’t believe in, come to haunt him from the skepticism of his science-hardened heart? Could he imbue this coincidence with deeper meaning?

He couldn’t and he wouldn’t. Instead, he remembered the clock had been fragile, that he’d fixed it several times. The nurse must have unsettled the inner workings when she’d picked it up. No miracle. Just an accidental jostle. An ordinary event. Eunjoo had followed a coyote into the cold. She’d become delirious with exertion. Those were the conclusions the evidence supported. No mysterious happening.

“Chica, you can tell me a story, that’s fine,” Calliope said. “But I don’t necessarily believe the animal you followed wanted me to hear it. What you did was dangerous. I don’t ever want you running outside by yourself again. That coyote was a wild animal. It could have killed you.”

Her bird’s voice guileless, she said, “Coyote told me you would say that.”

“Oh, really?” Calliope raised her eyebrows, half amused. She sighed. The child had gotten lost on her watch. She owed it to her to listen. “Fine. Tell me Coyote’s story.”

Eunjoo’s eyes, still black but flaked with citrine—she began in her birdlike rasp, yet clear and strong, as if she’d rehearsed this story many times before:

“In the days of the Ancients at the edge of Thunder Ridge where the gods of prey lived, there also lived the demon Suuke.

“The gods had made a village for themselves and tried to live and hunt in peace with their families, but whenever the children went hunting among the men or wandered to the outskirts of the village, the demon Suuke crushed and gobbled them up.

“The gods of prey asked who would kill the Suuke, for they needed a plan. Below the ridge in the gulch at the arroyo’s mouth, Coyote made his furtive home, scattered with animal bones, a feast of sinew and gristle leftover from the village. He heard their pleas and dropped the bone he was gnawing.