In my mind, my father is fucking the horse again. From the front, you can hardly tell. She blinks slowly; she is still. A web of thick veins branches up and across her hind leg, tributaries rushing toward one vast river. Behind her is my father, pants around his ankles.

Over time, my brain has refined the loop, adding a warm evening light that silhouettes him as he moves, the rustle of Claudia’s hooves against the sticky candy-cane wrappers all over the floor, cast off from the treats he was always giving her. The scene has played out in my head every day for almost three years.

The Thought has a way of sitting in the back of my mind—really sitting there, like it takes up physical space, and it is impossible not to touch it. I have tried, many times. But at least once a day I press it like a bruise, and if I don’t it eventually starts to play anyway. The sound of their asynchronous breathing: Claudia’s a deep sigh, a snort, my father’s a pant, quick and uneven.

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I believe the vision was born the day I went out to the barn to tell my father that it was time, that my mother was about to die. His hands were on Claudia’s flank, his cheek resting against her. He didn’t turn around. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said, and didn’t come. Not for hours, not until the coroner had arrived to take away the body.

My father acquired Claudia in the early nineties, when he worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming. It was there that he learned about the Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which declared wild horses “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and made it a federal crime to kill them. In the years following the Act, the wild-horse population exploded, wreaking havoc on the land and leaving the horses to fight it out with one another or starve. Slaughterhouses in the U.S. shuttered, and the government contracted cowboys to round up the horses into pens, spending millions every year to keep them alive.

The act is a topic about which my father can speak at great length. The ways in which it has failed to do what it set out to—protect the horses—the ways it is not more humane at all, really, and its secondary sin: that it is carried out in his name; i.e., at taxpayer expense. “If I were President,” my father often says, “the first thing I would do is overturn the Horses and Burros Act.” And, gathering steam, “The real problem is that Americans can’t look themselves in the face anymore. Everyone wants to be Jane fucking Goodall, but without getting their hands dirty.”

All through the night in those years with the B.L.M., my father helped do population surveys from helicopters, counting the white-heat outlines on a screen in the dark—ghost horses, the ones that had escaped the gatherers. During the day, he inspected the government holding facilities.

The first time my father saw Claudia, she was one of hundreds of warehoused young horses in a crowded pen. She was never a particularly attractive horse, nor particularly charismatic, in my opinion. But while my father was standing at the fence, back turned, she wandered up and bit him on the ear, and that was that. He offered to buy her at auction, but the manager gave her to him for free, since it would save the government thousands of dollars in food and upkeep.

My father named the horse after the model Claudia Schiffer, who had been in the news recently for dating a high-profile magician. He took the horse home to the house he had just bought with my mother, who was about to give birth to me. “You shoulda seen the legs on Claudia when she was young,” he would say wistfully, and I never could tell which Claudia he was talking about.

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As a teen-ager, when I couldn’t sleep, I would spend hours looking at every photo of Claudia Schiffer I could find. When I think of her now, I see the 1991 Spanish Playboy cover. In the photo, she kneels in wet sand in a pair of unzipped shorts, breasts poised to break free of the arm across her chest at any moment.

My mother did not look anything like Claudia Schiffer. She was brunette, and thick in the calves. At the end, she had no breasts to speak of, and, if she had, no one would have wanted to look at them anyway.

Horses are easy to injure but difficult to kill. Occasionally, euthanasia doesn’t take—some alchemy in their huge bodies fighting sedation. It’s also expensive, and sometimes a horse will react poorly, stumble around and fall hard, tongue lolling.

The other option is a bullet. It is less expensive, because the cost is the cost of a bullet. But you still have to figure out what to do with the body. At a slaughterhouse, they will shoot the horse for free and pay you a couple thousand dollars for the meat. You can guess which option my father chose when the time came.

For a long while, my father did not acknowledge the fact that Claudia was in the twilight of her life. Not when the tendons in her legs started causing too much pain for her to walk some days. Not when she shifted her weight back onto her heels, a telltale sign of hoof disease, from age and too much sugar. Not as her compulsions, which he called “her habits,” escalated and she began cribbing, a repetitive behavior in which she grasped the fence with her front teeth and yanked her head back, grunting. “Hey, lady,” my father would say softly. “Just relax.”

“The internet said we should try putting herbal tea in her feed,” he told me early one morning when I came into the kitchen to start the coffee, before my shift at the dentist’s office.

“Who?” I said, still half asleep.

“What do you mean ‘who’? Claudia. To help with her habits.”

He ordered camomile in bulk, but Claudia kept cribbing. The fence started to splinter, and her teeth started to wear. They had never been great to begin with. My mother had insisted on brushing them regularly, making me hold up Claudia’s rubbery top lip so she could reach every one of the yellowed, stonelike teeth. Even when my mother was too sick to go anywhere else, we went to the barn together once a week. The task seemed to soothe her. “Better?” she asked at the end of a session. “Much,” I said, in the affected mid-Atlantic accent she and I would use to channel Claudia. Lately, my father and I had been lax with the brushing.

In June, four months into the camomile regimen, a particularly loud plane from the military base flew overhead. The sound of it spooked Claudia so much that she ran the length of the fence back and forth for more than an hour, until she could no longer bear weight on her right front knee. At first, my father stood by the fence trying to calm her, calling to her and offering food, but eventually he went back into the house and sat in his armchair in front of the TV, without turning it on. “I can’t reason with her,” he said, shaking his head. A few hours later, when she finally lay down in the paddock, still shivering, skin rippling, I watched through the window as he went to her, wrapping his fingers in her mane and whispering something. He led her slowly back to the barn, and I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when I found him back in the armchair, slivers of hay clinging to his shirt.

That day, the day he finally realized he could no longer keep Claudia alive, my father declared that together we would drive her seven hundred miles to the Mexican border, where slaughterhouses abound.

“Please,” I said. “Please, can we just call the vet?”

“Claudia hates the vet, and I do, too,” he said. “He’s smarmy. I don’t want him to be the last thing she sees. And besides, I like the idea of her body being put to use. She would want that.” I felt the Thought coming on, felt myself drifting into the blurry space between thinking about the Thought and actually having it.

“You do it then,” I said. “You take her.”

“Dylan can come,” he said.

I paused. It felt like he was suggesting something drastic and incongruous. Taking our mailman on a cruise. Bringing a cat to a christening. My boyfriend, Dylan, existed in a different part of my brain from both Claudia and my father, and frankly I sometimes forgot him completely. But my father was right; Dylan loved both road trips and concrete tasks. He was an acts-of-service guy. My father sensed weakness in my pause and moved in for the kill. “You two can keep the money, make a vacation out of it. Should be almost three thousand dollars, for a horse like her.”

It was pointless to argue with my father when he was like this. And I needed the money, having spent all I had finishing the dental-hygiene program at the community college the previous year.

“Fine,” I said.

“We’ll leave Saturday,” he called as I stormed out of the kitchen. I made it to the porch before the Thought reared its head, my father and the barn and the click of his belt buckle, and I wished desperately that I could hate him the normal way.

In the five days before the journey, my father threw together his version of a hospice program. He fed Claudia all the things she liked most—red Skittles and candy canes and strawberries. Her favorite color was red, he explained. “She’s glamorous like that.” Every January, for as long as I could remember, we’d gone to the post-Christmas sales at the dollar store and at Walmart and bought up all the candy canes on clearance. Only the peppermint. “None of those bullshit pussy flavors,” my father said, glaring at a pack of multicolored Sour Patch Kids-flavored canes.

He also sprayed my Calvin Klein perfume around the stable, because he had heard a radio story about how animals like it. I tried to explain to him that it was just big cats. “Because of civetone,” I said. “It’s a pheromone, from the anal glands of a civet.”

“You don’t think Claudia can appreciate a good smell?” he said. I started hiding my perfume in a Tampax box behind the mirror. He used what was left of my mother’s Chanel No. 5 instead.

My mother took up drinking when she became a lost cause, and I took it up with her, in solidarity. I didn’t have the balls to shave my head, or anything like that, so I did what I could. I did not let her get fucked up alone.

We spent most of her last months drunk on the porch together, me sneaking inside to get another bottle of gin without my father seeing. “Did you get it?” she’d whisper, and I’d whip it out from behind my back or from up my shirt and we’d crack up. At some point in the night, when we weren’t really talking anymore, just looking out at the fireflies glimmering in the throats of the plants, we would light up her chemo weed. She watched me smoke the jay down, and then, when the only thing I could hear was cicadas, I set the still-lit joint on a little blue plate we kept outside for that purpose and went into the house. She had so few private moments by then, her body everyone’s business. I could give her this: let her smoke it alone, like a secret.

Inside, I forced myself to stay awake and listen for her footsteps. Sometimes she fell asleep out on the porch, and I would half carry her to the bed, which was empty, my father having moved to the guest room. “She sleeps better that way, and she needs her rest now,” he said. “We both do.”

My mother stopped drinking when she died, but I kept going, for both of us.

The thing about constantly seeing the image of your father fucking a horse is that there are very few people you can tell about it. Practically none.

The summer after my mother died, I used some of the money she had left me to go to Australia. I went because it was as far away as possible and because I wanted to learn to scuba dive. I had just started having the Thought, and I was hoping it would go away with travel and new experiences, such as going to the bottom of the ocean.

My father thought it would be good for me to spend some time on my own. He had noticed that I had been acting strangely around him, struggling to make eye contact, and I suspected he had found my stash of empties in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. “Go,” he said. “Get right with God.”

“I will,” I said, though I didn’t know what he meant by that, or how to approach doing it. I had never known him to be religious.

In Australia, I met a man, a boy, really, twenty-one and insufferable. “I’m young, but I’ve just done so much with my life already,” he said to me at our hostel’s wine-and-cheese night, in a packed, dingy common room. “I hate you,” I thought with a little thrill of pleasure, washing down a sweaty cube of cheddar with red blend. The next morning, he caught me on my way to breakfast, and soon he began accompanying me on every excursion.

It wasn’t until the third day, as we waited for a bus on an island known for its wild koala population, that he revealed to me that he had been a child star on a popular TV show my mother had been a fan of. His character flaws suddenly crystallized in a highly satisfying way.

On our last day together, the former child star suggested we go to a nude beach, falling over himself to explain that it was not sexual in any way, merely an experience he wanted to have.

“Sure,” I said. Naked with the child star. My mother wouldn’t even believe it.

“If you’re not comfortable with it . . .” he said.

“I’m fine with it.” He seemed disappointed by my readiness.

At the beach, there was a sign with images of four jellyfish in order of escalating concern, from unpleasant sting to instant death. Next to it was a sign that read “Clothing Optional.” We walked to a small cove, stripped down without looking at each other, and waded awkwardly into the shallows, sitting down on the sandy bottom. I was lulled by the heat and the shifting patterns of sunlight in the water. As often happened when I began to relax, I felt the Thought shift restlessly in a corner of my brain.

“Do you ever have really fucked-up thoughts?” I found myself saying to the former child star, before I could stop myself.

“Probably,” he said. “Like what?”

“Like sex stuff.”

“Like choking?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or, like, fucking animals.” I said it in a weird voice that was meant to be jokey but wasn’t.

“Not really, but people do all kinds of shit. My friend showed me a whole website of it. Really sick stuff.”

“Were there horses?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sheep, too. Everything.”

We fell silent, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, his face was close to mine. He gazed at me a moment, then leaned in.

“What are you doing?”

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Why would you ask that?”

“We’re at a nude beach together,” he said. “We’ve spent the past four days hanging out. You asked me for a piggyback on the way here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

He looked out at the horizon for a moment, then abruptly stood. “Well,” he said. “At least I’m not a fucking pervert.” He splashed back to shore, pale ass shining in the sunlight.

That night, I attended a free sound bath at the hostel, run by a thin British woman, who had given me a towel at check-in. The child star was already there, in butterfly position, ostentatiously meditating.

“Feel the rise and fall of the breath entering and exiting your body,” the British woman said, as she began to work the bowls. “If any thoughts do arise, allow them to pass through you like clouds in the sky.”

At the sound of its name, the Thought rolled over but remained silent. Instead, I found myself thinking over and over, “The antidote to jellyfish is vinegar.” I wished it was my own original thought, but I was fairly sure it was just from that cautionary sign at the beach. To my right, the child star was taking very loud, deep breaths and emitting low “om”s.

“You will likely find yourself feeling a bit raw for the rest of the night,” the woman said, when the bowls quieted, as she opened a beaded tip box. “And experiencing strange dreams.” I wished she had mentioned this beforehand.

That night, as I fell asleep, I thought I had finally done it. Escaped the Thought for an entire day. That maybe telling the child star had done something after all. Purged it. But then I dreamed it instead.

For the first time, it wasn’t happening inside the barn but on the nude beach, little sprinkles of sand in Claudia’s mane and stuck in the hairs around her prehensile lips, as if she had been grazing at the water’s edge. Dead jellyfish littered the shoreline, a pile of them at my father’s feet.

I did not tell anyone about the Thought again.

The morning of the drive, Claudia did not want to get into the trailer. My father went through the last two boxes of candy canes trying to coax her in, step by step. Dylan stood off to the side watching YouTube how-tos and offering nuggets of wisdom. “This guy says the issue is either about fear or lack of respect,” he said. “We’re supposed to act as much as possible like the trailer isn’t there.” Eventually, I sent him to the garage to look for the extra set of jumper cables, which we kept in the barn.

When Claudia finally climbed into the trailer, my father jumped down and turned to me. “We need to be prepared to ask them to shoot her in front of us. So that—” He broke off midsentence. “Stop doing that,” he said sharply.

“Doing what?”

He gestured at his chest, cupping his hands in the universal symbol for tits. Lately, my right hand had developed a mind of its own, wandering up my body and across my chest, gently palpating my breast tissue in moments of distraction. Two fingers pushing inward, seeking abnormalities. The worst part was that I didn’t even notice it anymore. Like nail-biting. I dropped my hand back to my side. “Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“To make sure they do it right,” he said, and walked back toward the house.

For the first two hours, Dylan drove, and we were quiet, the sun climbing higher and warming the car as I drifted in and out of sleep in the front seat, twitching awake every so often to check the trailer in the mirrors. My father sat in the back, staring out the window, an odd, blank look on his face.

At hour five, Dylan turned on a podcast about sustainable building practices and tiny homes, put the car in cruise control, and started eating pistachios, cracking them open and dropping the shells into his empty coffee cup. Sleep became impossible. I knew he was thinking about what we could do with Claudia’s blood money.

“Are you listening to this?” Dylan said. “It’s a lot easier than people think to build your own house. It’s actually really intuitive.”

“Can we stop soon?” I asked. “I have to pee.”

“Already?” my father groaned from the back seat. As we whizzed past several promising exits, I distracted myself by making a themed playlist, which I could only hope might nip the podcasts in the bud and discourage conversation.

At a 7-Eleven on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, I peered into the trailer’s little upper window to check on Claudia. She was sweating, her muscles twitching slightly. “We’re almost there,” I told her. “Keep your shit together for a few more hours and you’re home free.” I pictured her in Heaven, a silent, peppermint-scented place. “God loves horses,” I added.

Inside, I bought a cherry Slurpee, then quickly went back to the truck to locate the two airplane bottles of vodka Dylan kept in the glove compartment. They were tucked next to the first-aid kit, as though he thought he might one day need to perform a field surgery. I poured both through the straw hole of my cup to create a delicious cocktail and returned the empties to their place.

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My father emerged shortly afterward with a rope of bison jerky, Dylan with three oversized Rice Krispies bars.

“Are you kidding me?” I said, as Dylan climbed back in.

“What?”

“Do you even know what those are made of?”

He started the car.

“Horse!” I said. “Hooves or some shit. Everybody knows that’s what marshmallow is made of.”

“There’s no way,” Dylan said.

“Gelatin,” I said once he was driving again. “Look it up.”

“You look it up.”

“I don’t need to. I know I’m right.”

“I really don’t think Claudia cares,” Dylan said.

“Gelatin is an extremely useful product,” my father said. “And versatile.”

“Have some respect,” I said, and went back to my playlist.

“A Horse with No Name.” “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.” “Wild Horses,” by the Rolling Stones, Natasha Bedingfield, and Garth Brooks. “The Funeral,” by Band of Horses. That one was going to hit hard closer to the border.

Less than an hour later, my father asked where we would be stopping for lunch.

“We’re not stopping,” I told him. “We just stopped. You got food.” I sucked on my straw, hitting the vodka slush at the bottom of the giant cup, each sip a different combination of metallic and sweet.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “I had one piece of jerky. We have at least five hours left.”

“No.”

“Dylan, keep an eye out for an exit,” my father said. “Jesus, what’s the rush? Claudia gets carsick. She could use a break. Horses can’t vomit, you know. So she has to just suffer through it.”

“We’re not stopping,” I said.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was sitting across from my father at a Red Lobster. He was thoughtfully paging through the menu and trying to persuade Dylan to go in on a Shrimp Your Way with him.

“Do you like coconut?” he asked.

“Just a Bahama Mama for me,” I told our server, a pallid young man called Zachary.

“And to eat?” he asked.

“That will be all,” I said.

“Don’t they have cheesecake here?” my father asked, frowning at the last page of the menu. “Isn’t that their thing?”

“I think you’re thinking of the Cheesecake Factory,” I told him.

“Do not patronize me,” he said. “I mean it.”

When my drink came, my father dipped his fingers into it without asking, to fish out the cherries for Claudia. I slapped his hand away. When his food came, the Thought and I watched him bite into the veiny pink flesh of the shrimp, discarding the tails into a little pile, and I excused myself from the table. I had resisted the Thought all day, and pressure was building in that corner of my mind. In the parking lot, I opened the side hatch of the trailer to let Claudia stick her head out. She nuzzled my face, an act of tenderness quite unlike her. Her breath was atrocious.

Around hour seven, my father finally fell asleep, chin tucked to his chest like a giant toddler. Dylan checked the rearview mirror to insure he was out before asking if we could please talk about the money now. He was of the opinion that we should use it to seed a joint savings account, with which we would one day buy a tract of land somewhere, on which we would build our own homestead by hand. He had attempted some version of this with his first wife. It had not gone well. We had been fighting proxy wars about this plan since he first presented it, mostly through opposing allegiances with halves of the couples who tour houses on “Property Brothers.”

Dylan had been married twice before, and the second marriage was still in the process of dissolution, from a legal standpoint. He talked about the marriages as if some act of God had ended both of them. Like they were casualties of an earthquake, or a drunk-driving accident. “Sometimes it makes me so sad that I’ll never see her again,” he once said, on the topic of his first wife.

“Why can’t you see her again?” I asked. “Doesn’t she still live really close to us?” He ignored me.

“You go from knowing a person so well. To, all of a sudden, nothing. Hard to grasp the permanence of it all, really.”

“Gee, I can’t even imagine.”

“It’s tough,” he said, without any sense of irony. “Hard to even find the words.”

In the car, he fiddled with the air-conditioning. “Did you hear me?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, what do you want to do with it?”

“Stop scraping teeth,” I said. “And live alone.” He dropped it.

I wondered if, once we were rid of Claudia, the loss would feel permanent. If I might finally be free of the Thought, of my father’s pistoning hips. Outside, the landscape was opening up, drying out, turning from trees to scrub. My tongue was still red from the Slurpee, like a slab of raw meat inside my mouth. I guess that’s basically what a tongue is, technically speaking. I saw it in the side mirror while I was singing: “At every occasion, I’ll be ready for the funeral.” The song ended and started over, and I became aware that it had been on repeat for a while, that my hand was on my breast. I had lost track of time.

I palpated clockwise, like the internet told me to. Imagine the face of a clock over your breast, or the slices of a pie, it said. If my tits were a pie, I think they would be one of the nutty ones. Pecan. Or maybe Key lime. If my tits were from a state, they would definitely be from Florida.

“Dylan,” I said.

“Unh,” he said, just a sound at the back of his throat. He was pouting.

“Dylan.”

“What,” he said, not like a question.

“Dimpling, puckering, or skin that looks like an orange peel.”

“What?”

“Dimpling, puckering, or skin that looks like an orange peel. That’s what you should look for. Not just lumps.”

“Cool.”

“Could you maybe not be sarcastic when I’m telling you I might have cancer?”

“You don’t have to indulge the behavior, son,” my father piped up from the back seat, apparently awake now. “You can tell her no.”

Dylan sighed and ignored him. “I’m not being sarcastic, babe. We just checked last night.”

“No, really,” I said. “It’s dimpling. Give me your hand.”

He centered his left hand on the wheel then gave me his right, feeling my breast for the obligatory minute. “Nothing,” he said. “I don’t feel anything. There’s nothing there.” I squeezed the flesh again, then pinched it, trying to make the dimple reappear, the skin growing red and angry. But I couldn’t.

“Christ,” my father said.

Once, I had made my mother check a red bump on my vulva. She had grown tired of listening to me try to describe it. “Just show me,” she said. I sat on the closed toilet seat and opened my legs. “Ingrown hair,” she said immediately.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Sorry,” I said. “For making you look.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I changed your diapers.”

Out the window, scrub had given way to desert. The ground was a deep orange now, the color of thirst. I thought about a world where my mother sat on the toilet seat instead of me, where I stood in front of her, or my father did, and we told her to raise her arms above her head, and we put our hands where she told us to and said, “Yeah, I feel it.”

To understand horses, you must start by understanding that they are always afraid. I was never able to love Claudia, but, as a creature driven by fear, I could understand her.

“A horse is all about flight,” my father often said, when he was railing against the Horses and Burros Act. He was always quoting from this book about how animals make us more human, or something to that effect. He was especially proud of himself for reading it, because the author had autism.

Around the eleventh hour of our journey, as the sun was beginning to set, an unsettling banging started coming from the trailer. Claudia hitting her face against the wall, maybe, or cribbing on the metal window bars. I checked the mirrors, then the back seat. My father was asleep again, having exhausted all delay tactics. Asking to stop for a Coke, to check the trailer hitch, to see the World’s Largest Pistachio. I suspected that he, too, had ordered something to take the edge off at the Lobster, after I had left.

Dylan and I both tried to ignore the sound, but it got louder and more regular. “Pull over,” I said.

“We’re so close,” Dylan said. “It’s going to get dark soon. She’s fine.”

“Pull the fuck over,” I said, and something in my voice made him listen. He pulled into a gas station six miles from the border. He slammed his door and headed for the convenience store with long, angry strides. My father stirred, mumbling something and frowning.

I went around to the back. One of Claudia’s wild eyes was pressed to the window, like how I imagined a squid might peer into a submarine. The eye rolled slightly. My father appeared at my side. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice rough with sleep, then turned to Claudia without waiting for an answer. “Hey, lady,” he said, softening his tone. “I’m here. I’m right here.” His voice broke, and I saw tears on his cheeks. This man who had stood dry-eyed as we put his wife in the ground.

He opened the door and Claudia started backing up frantically, then became frightened by the sound of her own feet clanging on the metal. “Whoa,” my father said. He jumped up behind her and pushed hard against her hindquarters to get her back in. He grunted with the effort of it, put his hips into it, and Claudia gave a snort. “Good girl,” he said, as she took a step forward. “Just like that.” I felt a wave of nausea as he slammed the door and turned to me. “I’m going to see if they have peppermint candies in there,” he said. “Keep talking to her. Make sure she knows she’s not alone.” As he walked away from us, Claudia started cribbing again, biting down on the metal bars and throwing her head back, grunting with pleasure or pain. Blood on her lips. Another name for cribbing is windsucking. It sounds nicer that way. Something you do because you want to, not because you have to. The Thought had hardened to a knot behind my eyes. It pulsed with the sound of her teeth against metal. Bite, grunt. Bite, grunt.

Finally, the pulsing gave way to a rushing in my head, like I’d stood up too fast, and then I was back in the barn. It was night, lit only by the floodlights at the back of the house, flickering in a storm of moths. The smell of dust and wood, cut with some animal thing. My father thrusting behind Claudia, a moving shadow. In front, asleep at Claudia’s feet, was my mother in a nightgown, her body as small as a child’s. When my father emerged, he stood over her, trying to rouse her, to get her to stand. “Good girl,” he said. “Just like that,” as she awoke, rolling clumsily onto her knees.

As I came out of it, I found myself standing with one hand curled around the warm metal of the trailer’s door handle, the other on my breast. The sun was bleeding now, too, color pooling in every crevice of the sky, and Claudia was still going at it. Bite, grunt. Bite, grunt. Make sure she knows she’s not alone, my father said.

I flung the door wide open. Claudia released the metal bars and looked suspiciously over her shoulder at the open door.

“Go,” I told her. “Go. Get out of here.” She blinked.

“We’re trying to kill you,” I said. “You have to save yourself.”

Still, she refused to move.

And so I climbed in with her. I put my lips next to her hollow, pointed ears, two furred halves of a papaya, and screamed. She bolted, stumbling backward out of the trailer and running across the parking lot. At the Mobil sign, she tripped, steadied herself, and turned right, galloping down the center of the empty road.

The door to the convenience store burst open, and Dylan emerged, the glint of a blue-foil Rice Krispies Treat in his hand and my father on his heels. Dylan froze a few feet from the door, squinting at the scene. My father pushed past him and charged toward me, his face contorted in a way I had only ever seen in my mind. We locked eyes for the second that it took for him to process the empty trailer and then Claudia, at least a hundred yards up the road now and fading fast. Her body so quickly becoming silhouette. In that second, I saw the future: the long white grin of a horse skull picked clean, smiling with all of its teeth. The strange siren call of coyotes gathering in the night. My father, on his knees. Alone.

I screamed again, with the fury of some kind of visionary, some kind of witness, as he took off after her. He looked, for the first time I could remember, old. I stopped only when I was sure he could never catch her.

“I will think of you often,” I said, as Claudia disappeared over the horizon. And I did. ♦