“Come here,” Calliope said. “Let me see your thumb.” It had been bleeding steadily in the snow, dripping red into the ice. But now the white cloth wrapped around her skin was just that: white. Calliope unbandaged the thumb, gasped, “I don’t understand.” She turned the girl’s hand over in her palm, examining it as if it were a specimen in the lab. “Where …?”

“What’s wrong, mujer?”

“Her bite … the wound …” Calliope turned the pallid little hand over, back and forth as if she were making masa for a tortilla, searching for a slit, a scar, anything. “It’s gone.”

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-TWO

THE (QUANTUM) SUICIDE

People disappeared. Cities disappeared. Wounds disappeared. Even scars.

“None of this makes sense,” Calliope lamented. Night had fallen and the wind rattled through the bare bones of the trees surrounding the cabin, branches scratching against rooftop, fraying Calliope to ragged, exposed nerves. She’d made Eunjoo a sandwich, the little girl happily eating at the table, playing once more with the salt and pepper shaker figurines as if she hadn’t just nearly died in the snow, told Calliope a coyote had spoken to her, then miraculously healed right before Calliope’s eyes. Mother would’ve loved this story, attributing it all to Jesus and making the sign of the cross. What would Bisabuela have said?

Chance said, “Mujer, at the fundamental particle level, reality is fuzzy. It’s the uncertainty principle. We can never see simultaneously both the position of a particle and its momentum. Can never see, for instance, light as both wave and particle at once. We look away and when we look back can never know which it will be. We live in a world that wants to pin reality down. Quantum science tells us there is no pinning reality.”

“Like I said, I’ve seen it before,” Mara said, loading her rifle, pointing the muzzle away from the kitchen table, pulling back the bolt, and inserting the shells.

“Do you have to load that thing in here?” Calliope couldn’t shake the bitterness from her voice. She’d put Eunjoo in harm’s way enough times already. She couldn’t let the girl get accidentally shot by this trigger-happy woman set on revenge. She wouldn’t let guns in the house after the story of the rifle that went off through a window and shot and killed a girl across the street, most likely a malfunction from the cold weather that had set the trigger off even with the safety on.

“I know what I’m doing, honey. Been hunting with these rifles nearly fifty years.”

Calliope sighed exaggeratedly, turned away. Outside, the sky was new. The stars shone impossibly bright. The cottonwoods closest to the cabin rustled in the wind, a wind-dance. She imagined them playing flutes of wind. An incantation. “Okay then, Mara. Tell me what happened when you were a little girl. Seems this is the night of stories.”