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“Should we do it?”
    â€œWhere?”
    He points to an opening on her right. She nods, unbuckles her seatbelt, and gets out.
    He reaches behind the seat and says, “I brought something for us to put down on the grass.” It’s a towel, folded tightly and sealed with duct tape. He opens his door and gets out, walks to her side of the truck. He motions for her to walk ahead, then gestures before them, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
    â€œIt’s nice,” she says. She is concerned about being where no one can hear, but the forest just right here, the sound of the stream, reminds her of home. In the opening she sees three young apple trees. She knows apple trees from home. These trees should begin to bear good fruit this year. The trees make her smile. And the smells. They aren’t like the city. Kristine was right: How do we all survive this?
    She begins to walk down the path.
    She hears him walking behind her. He says, “Did you know that the word vagina is Latin for sheath?”
    She doesn’t know the English word sheath . She keeps walking.
    He says, “I never did tell you my favorite line from the Bible. It is from the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, where God instructed his chosen people to kill every woman who has had intercourse with a man, but spare for themselves every woman among them who has not had intercourse.”
    For just a moment too long she puzzles over the meaning of what he has said, and when she finally begins to understand, the last voice she hears is his, asking, “Nika, have you had intercourse with a man?”
    The ground is tilting and she is trying to run but the ground is moving far too quickly. She doesn’t know why the ground is tilting but the sound she heard must have been an earthquake that brings the ground up to meet her face. She sees the tan soil, the small stones, the yellow blades of dried grass and the green that lies beneath, and then she falls through all of these and into the dark inside the earth, and she sees her mother and her father and she reaches out to them as she hears her voice say inside her head, “Oh, mother, mother.”

five
    the muse
    I wonder if this is what it is like to be dead. I hope not, because I don’t want to spend all of eternity this confused. It takes as much effort to think as it does to move my hands, to move my feet. I wonder if this is how it feels to be stupid: maybe this is why people watch sitcoms, why they vote for Democrats or Republicans, why they don’t fight back: real thinking is too hard for them, so they simply don’t do it. I try to say this to Allison, but it takes too much effort, so I sit. Finally I say, “I’ll never be able to write like this.”
    I wonder if I am insane. I wonder if my brain has somehow become scrambled—and I wonder if I even think with my brain anyway—and if I will spend the rest of my life this way. I think I could do this for a day, maybe two, and then I would kill myself and hope I didn’t wake up like this after I was dead.
    The forest is beautiful, though, and I am glad it hasn’t been clearcut. I stare at the texture of the tree in front of me, the gray and black and green of the trunk, the maze of veins, each a home to tiny spiders and to others most humans never notice. I hear a voice again, “Don’t fight it.”
    I ask Allison if she said anything.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen who did?”
    â€œI don’t know, Derrick. Who did?”
    I don’t actually write what I write. I just write it down, then edit it. It’s written by my muse. I use the word my not to imply ownership, but relationship, as in my friend, my partner, my lover. She—my muse is a she, though I have no idea if all muses are female—is an actual being. She’s not a metaphor, a personification of my unconscious processes, or even some archetypal figure either bubbling up from my organs or the