She’d awoken sweating in the middle of the night in her own bedroom with cranes dipping from the ceiling. She’d awoken after running from a black-and-white creature with blotches on its face, a creature that would sometimes catch her, sweep her into its basket, take her back to the peach orchard at the bottom of the mesa. Sometimes it had eaten her whole, like a peach. Down to her pit.

Sometimes she had crept out of its basket while it was sleeping. Run back to Calliope.

It was always Phoenix’s mama in those dreams, never her own mother.

Her own mother with straight black hair, smaller than Phoenix’s mama, and quieter.

She’d thought the coyotes had come from her dreams. She was touching one to see if it was real. Or if she’d awoken in her own room again. She’d dreamt this so often. Coyote calling her.

Once, she had thrown peaches.

The biggest piece of fruit, she’d picked from the tree. It was golden orange and squishy. She pulled her arm back, aimed for the blotchy creature, and threw as hard as she could. The peach stuck in its eye.

In the plane, curled into a ball on a stack of maps, the new grown-ups yelling over the roaring of the plane’s belly, she hoped.

She hoped and hoped. That this would be the dream in which she defeated the creature before it could eat her. Or anyone else.

TWELVE

TWELVE

THE SUUKE

Are the stories real, Bisabuela?

The rebozo slung around Calliope’s head, a veil. Her eyes wide with ghosts.

Sí, por supuesto. We knew of the Red Sea, mija. Acoma song talks about it. How would we have known that otherwise? Our Ancestors were right.

Calliope had nodded in earnest at her bisabuela’s wisdom. Then she had grown up. She’d realized perhaps their Elders meant something like the red tide, algal blooms, not blood.