* * *
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But he promised, he had promised, that when it all went to hell, he would carry both sisters into the woods over his shoulders, with him and his ragtag band of brothers who could track and skin and gut and build real fire. “We’ll go up near the Great Lakes, where they’ll still have water, and you won’t have to work, you can just look for nice rocks and function in a sort of . . . shaman capacity,” he had told her. She felt ready. Had she not recently cleaned possum blood off a woman’s face, while only screaming very slightly? She picked up her knife and fork and took another wild bite of her destiny.
* * *
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“What a cute little pair of panties,” her mother said as she emerged from the laundry room, holding up a pair of her brother’s military silkies, which were the bright trumpeting yellow of the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and embroidered with the words NO STEP ON SNEK.
* * *
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Late at night, they gathered around the mandatory marble island to watch Sasquatch vids on her sister’s laptop, perhaps dreaming of their future in the woods together. In a landscape as still and crumpled as camouflage there was a sudden glitch, a pixelation in the leaves. A piece of the forest rose from a crouch, seeming to glance over his great, grizzled, secret-keeping shoulder. It was the Sasquatch, and as always at this point, the cameraman absolutely lost his shit. He never held steady, he never crept closer, he never zoomed in. When what he had been looking for his whole life revealed itself, he flung the camera away from him, as if it were on fire and as far as it would go.
“Did you see the Sasquatch, honey?” her sister asked, rubbing her still-flat belly, and all of them saw it then, that invisible flash between human trees.
* * *
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When they ran out of credible Sasquatch sightings, they turned to the greatest reality show of all time, Naked and Afraid. A man and a woman were dropped naked into the middle of the wilderness, and immediately two things happened. The woman started weaving palm fronds, and the man began to go insane from lack of meat. （This generally led to him eating some kind of dubious trout and having diarrhea in what the woman considered to be “their front yard.”） The whole thing would make a spectacular gender-reveal party, come to think of it. The mom and dad could appear stripped and mud-smeared before their guests in lushest suburbia, and if the baby was a girl? Palm fronds. If it was a boy? The dad could shit himself and weep.
* * *
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A miracle that new people just kept coming into the machine like pinballs—and we were the ones playing it, it was the nimbleness in our fingers that kept them going and the red score running higher. Her sister, five years younger, had broken her arm one afternoon while she was supposed to be babysitting. She stepped out of the room for a moment, and there was a scream like a black rip in the air; the fracture, shining with readiness, had come leaping out of the skin with a white ka-chink. Now a new body was knitting in the body that had broken on her watch, and it would trust her too. It had to. They would carry it on their backs into the woods.
* * *
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“What is it like to have a child right now?” she asked her brother after everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet—and what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth time. “Oh, it’s great,” he told her. “Everything’s on fire, so you no longer have to worry about doing a good job.” His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.
* * *
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Life didn’t flash before your eyes, she thought, as they lost control of their little toy car and went fishtailing over black ice driving south through Kentucky, barely missing a timber truck that had slid to a gentle backslash on the highway. Maybe she didn’t have enough life to flash, she considered, as her husband cried out, “I love you, I’m sorry,” and flung his arm like a seat belt across her chest. All that happened was that she stumbled out of the car at the next exit, leaned over heaving with her hands on her knees, her rib cage trembling inside her like a cracked bone butterfly, and began to laugh in a high girlish uncontrolled voice, as if in the course of endless scrolling she had just seen the funniest fucking thing.
* * *
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The story of the country could be told in billboards alone, she noted as they drove on, still bursting into reasonless giggles from time to time, the words I’m sorry! I love you! I love you! I’m sorry! still echoing in her left ear. Someone wrote them, but that is not what provided their meaning. SHOOT REAL MACHINE GUNS: MACHINE GUN AMERICA. IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING ABORTION, DON’T! ACTORS, SINGERS, AND TALENT FOR CHRIST. Her closeness to home is what did it, and how she would start involuntarily weeping when she saw GET YOUR BODY BACK—SPECIAL OFFER FOR MILITARY.