“What were you doing when it happened? That light? Could you see it in Santa Fe?”

Amy shook her head.

Calliope shifted her weight from one sore foot to the other. “You didn’t see what happened at all? I slammed my car into the bridge, blacked out, and woke to this wasteland.”

“You think it was the government? A conspiracy, like the FEMA concentration camps?”

Calliope had heard this conspiracy theory before—that FEMA had built internment camps like those used for Japanese American citizens during the Second World War, which they would again use for citizens after a natural or self-made catastrophe, when they’d gained Constitutional control toward a new world order. Each time her students had written about this conspiracy or asked her opinion, Calliope had said it felt like a misuse of history, from which we could glean real truths and predictions. Misguided as the 2003 then 2012 Mayan calendar end-of-the-world forecasts. The massacres of the ancient peoples had occurred earlier than that.

She told Amy as much.

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t see how they could disappear entire cities that quickly. I mean, without a ray gun or something.” Amy laughed ironically, then said, “Hey, you think it was nuclear?”

Calliope had thought about it. Andres had once told her about a patient he’d picked up in his ambulance outside of Albuquerque. An older woman had called emergency services because her sixty-eight-year-old husband was behaving bizarrely—he hadn’t returned from his walk along the bosque so she went looking for him. She found him near a dry arroyo, writhing on the sandy ground. He was nearly mad from pain and kept screaming, The witches are burning me, the witches are burning me—make them stop! When Andres got him to the hospital, believing he would be a psychiatric patient, the nurses had found red burn marks all over his body. Andres had felt such guilt for missing them. The burns matched those of radiation. Toxic waste. In the land.

She decided against telling Amy this. She didn’t want to speculate about end-of-the-world theories. She wanted evidence. She wanted truth.

Besides, if it had been nuclear, that meant her family was …

“No. You and I wouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that too.”

Calliope sighed heavily and leaned against the broken fender.

Amy said, “You really smashed that thing. You get hurt?”

“Not much,” Calliope answered, wondering why she wasn’t more hurt from her crash on the bridge. “So, what’s your story? What were you doing before … whatever happened?”

Amy’s cheeks and neck blotched a deeper shade of rose. “I was indisposed.”

“Meaning?”

Amy shuffled, stuck her hands in her back pockets. “I was, um, giving a private dance to this older guy. A client of mine.”

Calliope blurted out before she could censor herself, “You’re a prostitute?”

Amy rolled her eyes, sighed loudly. “No, an exotic dancer. There’s a big difference.”