She wanted to bury her, wrap her in one of Reina’s sheepskin blankets beneath the cottonwoods. But she couldn’t dig into the ground with a shovel. Couldn’t lift her friend’s body. Besides, she wanted to leave her friend where someone would find her. When this nightmare was over and the rescue workers came.

She took the gun out of Susana’s hand and put it in the hip elastic of her own pants, the metal hot against her skin. She’d never held a gun. She took straw and pressed it into the wound. Susana seemed to be made of straw. She was sprouting.

Calliope thought of Shanidar Cave in Iraq, the first proof of deliberate burial of the dead, where Neanderthals left grave goods with their bodies—animal bones, boar jaw—beneath stone slabs. Johansen, discoverer of Lucy, saw it as a spiritual act. Calliope was never convinced. Art appeared in human evolutionary history only with Homo sapiens. She hypothesized the prehistoric burial was for hygienic purposes, to keep decaying bodies from contaminating campsites, perhaps even for respect. But love?

She opened Susana’s mud-clenched hand. Susana held a rock, one smooth stone in the mess of dirt and blood and straw. Calliope polished it on her tunic and placed it back in Susana’s hands, laying one atop the other across her chest. Now the rock was Susana’s graveless grave good. Calliope didn’t know what prayer to say. Her mother’s rosaries didn’t seem like enough. Where was God anyway?

She sang Susana’s song. “Los pollitos dicen pío pío pío, cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.” She felt cold. Who would discover her friend’s body in the hay?

She walked back to the car, trembling. Eunjoo’s door was open. Calliope had been such an idiot, leaving the girl alone. She whispered her name, unsure why she was whispering except that she was scared again, same as when she’d seen the hunter’s rifle in his passenger seat.

Footprints in the mud. She followed them back to the house. From the kitchen, the faint sound of rustling leaves, the crumpling of paper, or was it the scuffing of boots?

“Eunjoo?” Calliope pulled the gun from her hip, unsure how to use it but figuring she could hold it for effect. “Chica?”

In the middle of the kitchen floor, holding a box of crackers and dipping them into peanut butter, the girl smiled, her mouth full with crumbles and paste. “I was hungry.”

Calliope exhaled, relaxing, and replaced the gun in the elastic of her pants. All the digital clocks were blank, all the analog clocks stuck at twelve. Still, the darkness had taken on a hazy texture, as if light were nearby. If morning still existed, Calliope sensed it was approaching. “I’m sorry, chica.” Her stomach growled, but she was too upset to eat. “It’s probably breakfast time.”