Calliope couldn’t explain to Amy why it bothered her. She stayed silent, observing through the window the alterations in her bisabuela’s homeland, this place Calliope had returned to searching for answers. Clouding the sky, a brick red swirling that seemed to morph into a bird then split at the wings and separate into two distinct creatures. This wasn’t a normal storm approaching, Calliope felt it, and they didn’t have anywhere safe to hide. Anvil crawler lightning spread like limbs of a tree, branching purple across the birdlike clouds. But the sky remained illuminated much longer than normal, discharging in slow motion. How long until the strange lightning reached them?

When Eunjoo awoke, she had to go to the bathroom. Traveling with children was the same stop and go and stop again, no matter whose children they were.

They pulled over, Calliope instructing Eunjoo to squat beside the sagebrush in the arroyo wash. She’d let Andres take Phoenix to the roadside on day trips, show him how men can unzip and stand, relieving themselves beside any tree or bush. With girls it was an ordeal. Andres always teased Calliope for her squeamishness, her fear of outhouses and pit toilets. It could grow tentacles and snatch me, she’d tell him. I could fall in and drown in a pit of shit. It wasn’t her mother’s hellfire and damnation that scared her anymore but drowning in sewage.

From the truck, Calliope could hear Amy swearing and digging around. “Fuck. I’m all out of gum. Who doesn’t keep gum in the glove compartment?” After a moment, “Camels? Camels? Dammit. Calliope, it okay with you if I smoke? I’ll move away from the truck.” Calliope called back that she didn’t care. If she could handle volcanic ash, she could handle secondhand smoke.

Although Eunjoo was still a stranger she’d only known a day, Calliope felt almost comfortable showing the girl how it was done, if not motherly, then sisterly. Her protruding belly tipping her center of gravity, Calliope steadied herself and pulled down her own leggings and stuck her nalgas backward toward the sand, careful to keep her chonies, leggings, and Susana’s gun that she’d pouched there for safety bundled together at her knees, away from the stream, toward a patch of reddish wildflowers wilting against a rock.

Amy’s screams sounded like a barn owl screeching.

“Get the fuck off me, motherfucker!”

Calliope hustled into her leggings, quickly, whispered to Eunjoo, “Pull up your pants. Hide in the sage.” She motioned with her chin five feet further from their squatting spot. “Don’t move.”

Eunjoo’s black eyes filled with fear, but she nodded and followed Calliope’s instructions.