People reflect on the ivy and the big oaks over cobblestone streets and do not consider that the sons and daughters that they send to college won’t return. They don’t figure that the rich donors who move out here from St. Louis will ever stop supporting the town’s local traditional brass band or that they’ll get bored of going to the wineries and overlooking the cliffs full of grapes leading down to the river. Once they realize that the locals are fiercely protective of the culture of their town and won’t even let them get a seat on the hospital board, that care for the well-being of the town ends. They’ll buy up some property and treat it just like anywhere else. They’ll open up a property speculating limited liability corporation during the height of an economic downturn and buy up 1.3 million dollars’ worth of property in Duden County.

Visitors might come to the riverfront drive in Armin and, thanks to Amelia, not even be able to tell that business after business was falling over and sliding into the Missouri River.

Amelia had lived an idle life. She had left her husband a few years back—a towering, passive man—after their daughter had passed, and she moved back to her hometown to be closer to her sister, and things were slow. The days seemed to be without a wavelength. An even-keeled thing, calm. Time seemed like a placid body of water. She didn’t feel much, had no real sexual pleasure. Like bored people tend to do, she developed habits. Coffee well into the day, stopping at lunch. Lots of wheat bread, cream cheese. She walked to the library to get on the internet and send emails to old, faraway friends. She would show up at her sister Marie’s home and bullshit around with her. She had fun, killed time, did things appropriately.

But it was always when she was alone that she felt the stillness and dead complacency not within her but within the air around her, and while she knew she didn’t want to meet any other men (the idea embarrassed her too much to even begin to accept it), she could not figure out how to approach it.

She would daydream about catastrophic events happening. Meteors, floods. Invasions. Sexual assaults, home invasions, robberies. She did not approach them with fear in her head. They were tests, almost. She thought about them a lot. What she would do, how she would behave. She tried to not let herself give herself any easy answers.

She would be okay dying in an earthquake or a fire, but not in an assault. She would be able to easily get over a flood as long as she was able to keep her stuff dry (she had a large collection of crafts and books and other miscellaneous objects). She would rather have her stuff completely destroyed than damaged.