“It’s scary times, mujer. Stories are for these times.” He looked hard at Calliope, his expression tinged with something like guilt or regret, a haze she couldn’t quite read. Then his face cleared, a kind of peace, and he said, “Mujer, you want another way of looking at the world than the beliefs you were taught. Well, I was fishing at Quemado Lake watching the sun skim the ripples in the water, nothing tugging on my pole, but I didn’t care, I was thinking of an equation. The numbers and letters dancing in my head like they were part of a ceremony—they knew what their part was and they had to embody it fully to call their Spirit forth.” He shook his hair back from his face where Eunjoo had scattered it, and Calliope imagined the equations dancing around the pair of them as he spoke, could almost see the shadows and shapes encircling the tall, two-headed statue they made against the slate of the mountains beyond, the impossible blue of the sky. His hair fell back in his face anyway. He spoke with the passion of a podium, his voice amplified by an invisible microphone. “There was a moment of light. The equation and the numbers became one and the same. They converged. The equation didn’t just represent the concrete reality. The equation was the reality. As if a veil had been lifted.”

Apocalypse. Lifting a veil. Calliope’s heart beat faster, as on a dig, unburying fossilized fish scales from the sediment of a mountaintop and realizing it had all once been underwater.

“I never caught a fish that day. Not one tug. But I found something better. It’s the same with the stories.”

Her eyes stung from the cold wind, or his story.

They walked along the cracked asphalt forest giving way to yellow grasses again. Calliope checked the map every once in a while, to be sure they were making progress toward Silver City, though it might have been futile; if the map hadn’t shown them the highway was actually abandoned and overtaken, how could she trust it at all? They were hamsters on a wheel. She’d never walked so relentlessly without breaking. Excursions for her dissertation she always had a vehicle and only trekked a few miles at a time.

Even with hiking boots and thick socks, her muscles alternated between warped as gummy plastic melting into a fire and tense as the brittle, contorted shape it twisted into once that plastic dried. Her pelvic floor ached, and she kept her hands under her belly for support. A sharp pain needled the small of her back. She clenched her jaw and kept walking, the forest yielding to scrub and rocks.

After several minutes of silence, Eunjoo asked, “What kind of animal was it?”

“Huh?”

“That your brother found, where the broken bone was.”