 Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight actual, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight. She couldn't articulate the change exactly. It's just the light seemed odd, like the slightly surreal light of a nightmare. She had overslept. She was used to waking at the sound of his alarm. Woken dazed and blinking into this odd day, the cool and yellow morning. Before she woke the girl, she stood on the deck. I have use of my limbs she thought without knowing why she thought it, and went back into the house. She dressed the child and combed her hair, and she shook cereal into the bowl for her distractedly. This child seemed not to notice anything at all. She was still pliant with sleep and ate without speaking, but with an unfocused concentration she brought to most tasks, that she brought even into her dreams. Her face concentrated even in the task of its dreaming, mirroring perhaps the dream face which rarely smiled. It was too late now to hurry, and the girl ate slowly. The mother had the urge to smack her. She turned her eyes down to the mug of her coffee, and took a sip from it. Without milk or sugar, it tasted wholly of acid and drank. She was coming awake. Where's daddy today? Halfway through the soggy bowl. The girl was halfway through the soggy bowl. Went to work early. You know, he might get home late too after you're in bed. I feel funny, said the girl. Funny how? Shrugged. The mother put a testing hand against a silky forehead. You're fine. I feel funny. Yes, she wasn't fine. The forehead was hot. But Jesus God, just a moment alone today of all days. Children made noise, the woman had been told. But nobody had ever told her that the noise that children made would be this intolerable. The noise they made, the sneezing and singing and screaming and shrieking, nothing wrong when she raced to the other room. The child was shrieking with delight and crying, crying, a scraped knee, a broken doll, and the cat crashing of toys and furniture and bodies. This noise was near constant, slowly growing throughout the waking hours, swelling in the afternoon to an evening crescendo, the noise under everything, diminishing every pure thought in action, the noise she could not block out but had to monitor for signs of true distress. Even alone, one child, Christ, imagined two, looking down at the sick daughter. She was small. She was six years old, very small, but turning already, or should she say, finally human, with her own thoughts. Dark as her father, darker than him, the mother had not made a mark on her. Okay, stay home with me today. I'll call the school. You go back to bed. I don't want to. You go to school or you go back to bed. No. Don't try me right now. The anger in her own voice scared her. The girl, the girl fled. Annika. She called the school. Something going around. She was shaking. The anger in her voice sounded like her mother's. Annika? She lay in her bed, still with her school clothes on, and pressed her face into the pillow. Now the mother was gentle and stroked her back. The structure of her ribcage was like hands. Ribs had an affinity with slender fingers. The little body contained a soul. She wasn't crying, but her face was flushed. Come, let's get you. No! Let's get you. Annika, still, for she was squirming, then shivering, as the woman lifted the dress over her head and pulled down the tights. Her baby's body gone skinny. The ribs, the dark chest, tiny nipples. Her pajamas were pink. They buttoned. She dressed the girl into them and then tucked the blankets around her. Still cold? She nodded. You'll warm up. Read me. The same book, when they could both easily recite by memory. Father, too. The mother made herself patient. One winter morning, Peter woke up and looked out the window. The body beside her felt incandescent. She could have been sick the day before and the mother hadn't noticed. Maybe even two days before. Had she? Three pages and the girl was dozing. The mother shut the curtains and went out of the room. Out the window, the sky had a certain unrealness and she stepped outside to gaze at it. The air felt very dry in her throat. The hills sloped away from the house, bare for a mile, and then trees started. Not tall enough to block the view yet, but they were creeping slowly upward and one day they would. The woman was remembering the hillside when it was green and jeweled with newts, bisected purple and orange with sideways eyes, cool on the palm, their movement slow with terror. The girl had caught. Delighted. They lost their tails, she told the mother, if they were caught. Does it hurt? The mother didn't know. What happens to the tail? Does it become a whole new newt? The mother said maybe. And then the girl's lighting up with, the girl's eyes lighting up with understanding. Is that how humans are made too? Baby, the mother asked, do we have tails? But the rain had not come for months and months and the hillside had browned. Some would say become golden, but she would say brown and it was not bitterness because she had felt this way for years, wary of summer. The light was golden, as light should never be, but the, as light should be, but never is. Then she got the first dark scent. Oh, what now? But the feeling was like wonder. Smoke? She was a body in air. As he was speaking last night, she could hear the water in his mouth. That is his spit. She could hear the sounds of the mouth that happened around the words, of the lips opening and closing, of the tongue sliding, and occasionally of the click of teeth. Under the sound of the words was the sound of breath. The breath that carried those words. So at first it was difficult to hear them, the words. And when she did hear them, there was so much space around them. She thought, well, I'm okay. But later, only a little later, she realized it had just been shock. She had not let the words into her body. It was though she had just placed a pill on her tongue, and while she could feel the weight of it there, she could not yet taste it. Alone in the almost empty house, for the girl was sleeping, his words began to enter her. She tasted them. She felt the burning of their swallow. She felt them come into her bloodstream. She stood in front of the mirror, not yet weeping. His words had changed her. She wanted to see it. Her features were the same, but they had a different meaning now. She looked older and sour, and she saw the lines on either side of her mouth and traced them with her finger. The lines of her mother, her mother's sourness, oh, God. And then she turned away from the mirror with a clenching, a balling up, for once her tears began to form, she would not be able to stop them. For days, she would live in a daisy red and swollen mind, stuffed up as if by cold, and eyes always leaking in betrayal. Inside she turned on the TV for news, but there was nothing, only soaps. Three channels came in, and a Spanish channel, and a Christian one switched it off, and restless. She went into the child's room. She slept with her mouth open, the girl. Sick, the child was docile. Hers, she was her mother's, but not her own. Too docile, suffering, but the face in sleep was angelic. She had forgotten to take the girl's temperature like a bad mother. She had not given her any medicine like a bad mother. Should she, should she wake her? But didn't the body need sleep most of all? She thought of the drive to school with her daughter pulling to the curb and watching her walk into the stony building. Then she had not thought, but likely she would have ended up at the ocean. Walking, walking, or sitting, but just sitting in the car, dry, watching the sea fold over. Where was he, work or Started by a knock at the door. She looked through the window in the kitchen and saw a man in uniform. He started speaking as soon as she opened the door, polite, but with little preamble. The hillside was burning, far off, but uncontained, growing in the other direction still. Are you all right? She nodded. She was not sure what shape her face had been in to make him ask. It's not going to come this close, I promise you. Then why do we have to leave? She heard herself speaking like a child. The man had a face she noticed, a young face, dark with stubble, the kind of man who couldn't keep his chin clean. The eyes of the man were amber with pity under his hat. Just a precaution, really. There's no need to be afraid. Do we have enough water? What? To put the fire out? Helicopters, he said, come from the lake. Is there enough water in the lake? No need to worry. We're just being extra careful. Don't cry now, she told herself, then it won't stop. She watched his jeep turn in the drive and wave to him. And how she stood looking dumbly out at the possessions they had gathered and arranged. Each thing was in its place with few subtractions. He had taken only a few shirts and pants and a beloved sweater she sometimes borrowed in two books. Each thing was in its place and clean because she had just cleaned. She went to the kitchen and opened the utensil drawer and looked down at the spoons. Which should she take? And would they melt? She began to take them out of the drawer and put them in a paper bag with handles, then the forks. Not the real knives with teeth, but the gentle butter knives made for spreading. Then she took out the utensil holder and put that in a bag too. The drawer looked very odd undressed. She took off her wedding ring and put it in the drawer and closed it hard. She could hear the gold slam against the wood. Mommy, in the doorway of the room, as if in a frame of a picture, but who would paint a child like this skinny and weary, the eyes of it oddly yellow? Her baby, go back to bed, auntie. I was sick in bed. What? I was sick. She had spit up like a baby, her breakfast, souring the sheets and on her night clothes. Her mother undressed her for a third time and pulled the foul clothes off the bed. Heat came off the body of the child like it would a radiator. But now the mother would be a good mother, lifting the girl who smelled sweet in her hair and taking her to the bathroom and running a bath as she waited, wrapped in a towel on the toilet to keep warm. The mother poured a spoon of blue medicine down the girl's throat, bitter, but she told the girl of Shiva's heroism, sucking the poison from the ocean as it was turned by the gods and holding it in his dark throat so the rest would stay unharmed. Will I turn blue? No love. Why so tender and tears suddenly rising and you go, have I been bad? No. Then why are you crying? You're just sick. Sometimes when people are sick they throw up, it's okay. She washed her daughter's hair. The girl was having trouble keeping upright and wanted to lie down. Her head bubbled under the water for a few seconds as it followed its own weight. Almost at the mother patting the body dry. She brought a two big t-shirt for the girl and slipped her arms and neck through it. Forcing her tears back into her eyes took all her effort. But she wiped her face and turned to the girl and smiled, okay kiddo, back to bed. In her parents' bed the child looked tiny. That's all for now. Thanks guys.