“We’re going to my friend’s house. I’ll clean you up there.” Calliope was thinking like the hunter. Assuming Susana would be there. Susana Díaz, PhD. A big-boned woman with skin the color of banana bread, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and the thick, straight black hair of her Chihuahua ancestors. Her partner, Reina, was a petite woman with short graying hair and skin the hue of gingerbread. Clean-cut in her pantsuits, Susana was an activist in the community and a poet. A few years earlier, Susana had welcomed Calliope to the Anthropology department at the university. Calliope specialized in archaeology, and Susana specialized in ethnology, which meant that while Calliope studied rocks, Susana studied people. On the surface, a coveted tenure-track position had called her back to New Mexico, but the truer reason she had returned to Bisabuela’s homeland was to revise her dissertation, to find new research that would undo the harm she’d done. She owed her bisabuela that much. The Puebloans had an emergence myth, that this land was the center of the world—and she’d wanted to do right by Bisabuela. Make up for the mistakes she’d made. Their ancestors had renamed themselves The People. And this was The Place.

In the South Valley, panaderías clouded behind dirt streets and chile ristras strung from porches like red ropes around necks. She whispered into the blackness, Give me back my boy.

She pulled up to the casita. A woman sat cross-legged on the ground. Her friend was alive. Calliope unbuckled Eunjoo, holding her closely despite the girl’s wetness. She pulled Phoenix’s backpack from the trunk since she hadn’t managed to grab Eunjoo’s after the eruption. She trudged up the muddy walkway, past the cornfield, Eunjoo clinging to her, smelling of a sickly pungent straw bed. Why was Susana on the ground? Woman in the mud like petrified wood or a rock formation. Chickens squawked from their roosts, flinging feathers into Susana’s dark hair. The petrified woman, Calliope’s friend, drew scribbles in the dirt. Circles, tree rings.

“Susana? Estás bien, amiga?”

Her friend, the feminist scholar, barefoot and sundressed on the hard-packed driveway, buried her toes in mud. Her face, ashen and wrinkled, cellophane-papered. She didn’t respond. Calliope set Eunjoo on the ground, knelt, and took Susana’s hands in her own. “Susana? Qué ha pasado? Dónde está Reina?”

Susana hummed under her breath, began singing, childlike, an eerie pitch to her voice. “Los pollitos dicen, pío pío pío, cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.” Calliope knew this song from childhood. She’d always found it pitiful that the little chicks were so cold and hungry. But Susana sang it the way a ghost mother would. Like La Llorona searching for lost babies, swept away in floodwater. Or rather, like the babies, calling for their mama—their bodies washed onto embankments, bluish and waterlogged.