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someone unseen is chasing them. Then there’s just her, or rather she has become the other woman, Irina and not, and everything surrounding her now has a strange name. She is running without clothes or English words. Then she’s falling into a hole or animal den and she’s hurt and can’t stand. She reaches as she can and covers herself with leaves and dead branches and tries not to breathe. The steps come near and pass by. The spell ends and she is standing at the fuse box with a black towel draped over her head.
    What was between Denise and Stefan now would always be between them, she knew. She had no choice but to deceive her husband. He stayed with her at the house and worked from home, and took her to town when he ran errands. Her escape wasn’t planned but rather enacted as if it had already been scripted by Another, and so when she found herself waiting in the car for him to emerge from the post office, and getting out and going around to the driver’s side and starting away, she knew not to look in the rearview mirror, knew he wouldn’t have come out of the building yet, and then she was out of town and on the highway. And the certainty and the fear cleaved as one, and for the first time in her life she understood that the trials endured in Scripture by Jonah and Job were not a way of putting modern human fate in perspective, or a way of seeing our own small troubles in dramatic stories, but were real. For the first time in the life of her faith she felt truly descended from Eve and from Noah’swife, and she drove with images flashing in her from her dreams of the previous night, which had fired into puzzling shapes and happenings so that all morning she felt more alone for not understanding them and having no Old Testament Daniel to interpret the dreams for her.
    From the highway Denise saw the hard grey stem of smoke marking Shoad’s hill and she covered the miles feeling directed, confirmed in her direction. She turned onto Shoad’s property and started up the winding, wooded road, past the hand-drawn Private Do Not Enter sign, and the store-bought No Trespassing sign farther up, and came out at the clearing that held Shoad’s house and outbuildings. She stopped the car between the house and the barn and sat looking at the clapboard building, weather-spackled green, with a few steps up to the front door, two large blind windows in front, and a simple, medium-pitched roof, not the peaked, terrible thing that was its truer form. The yard was orderly, dominated by the solid-looking barn. Shoad’s truck, the one Irina had driven to the house, was nowhere. There were no cars or trucks at all. The only presence was the smoke coming from behind the barn.
    She got out of the car and stood for a second in the silence with the door open and the keys in her hand, scenting something on the air she thought was time itself burning up, revealing a new character in the shadowless noon light. All moments in Scripture are eternal, the time of the resurrection and the time of the Lord’s dying, and in the certainty of her righteousness she advanced on the house thinking that whatever would happen had already happened and the onlychoice before her was no choice but to act according to the examples handed down through the turning ages that began upon the first disobedience and expulsion. She climbed the steps and looked through the window in the door into a mudroom leading to a kitchen. Covering the floor as far as she could see, from the door to the cupboards under the counter, were the horns of animals, cow horns and deer antlers strewn and tangled in a small apocalypse. Shoad wanted no one stepping inside. The door was either locked or in some way composed into a trap and so she stepped back down and moved along the length of the house and around to a padlocked door, up the other side, barely able to see into the windows and then finding in each only dull yellow blinds admitting nothing. The whole place was the shape and