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hours ago but left its heat pinned like a dress in the sky and everyone moves slow beneath it. Remy wears dirty red shorts and her blond hair hangs over the front of her shoulders. Her dog, whom she calls Dog Man because she can’t settle on a name – seems impossible to move on from Harvak – digs up a green crystal and she grabs it and slides it into her pocket.
    “Keep looking. We’ll find it. Keep going, Dog Man.”
    Brothers Feast walk past discussing a jailbreak in reverse. A hairless man slows and smirks at Remy as the others walk ahead shoving each other and laughing on the road out. The man smells like dead dogs and Remy instinctively begins tapping her finger on her thigh. Moonlight filtered through trees forms a birdcage around his head. Remy throws dirt into the air and he ducks, not sure where it will land until it’s heard raining on a truck’s hood and he stands back up with a jump.
    He says, “Freak-o,” and walks backward three steps before turning and catching up to the group, tripping once and falling to his knees before picking himself up and running again even though he’s hurt and badly limping.
    “Smell you later,” she says, remembering the saying from a city show she once heard from the family radio while sitting inBrother’s lap. He had new hair on his arms and she had no idea what the phrase meant but she loved it and wrote the words several dozen times in her school notebook around and inside of previous drawings of crystals.
    Remy tells Dog Man that if she can increase her count she will possess the power to reverse Mothers. She pictures Mom gathering crystals by the valley-full with flowered fingers, light radiating in tunnels from her mouth and eyes, green looping inside her body from throat to stomach in an endless U. A tunnel of light from her left eye connects to Brother and guides him across a bridge built from prison to her. Just for her. Brother comes back to the house and into a seated position with Remy in his lap pulling his hairy arms over the front of her body. The radio shouting cartoons. The family at full count forever. Mom says, making eye contact with Remy inside the dream, cartoons blaring rain and cars and speech bubbles We have one person to thank and it’s Remy!
    “Come on, dig more.”
    He looks up at her before churning the ground with alternating paws, nose down.
    “I know they exist.”
    Yesterday Mom spent the afternoon in her room. She dropped something heavy on the floor that moved the house. Inside the drawing on the wall of the red crystal, the baby moved, and suddenly, Remy hated the drawing and wanted it gone. Dad was with her, and they both looked up before looking at each other, no idea what causes a thudding sound like that – dense, sharp, centered. Remy asked for paint. Later, Dad walked out of the room and ran to the bathroom to see if Mom was okay. Remy waited and waited, nothing to do with her fingers but tap her knees until falling asleep, only to be told when she woke from the weirdest dream ever, a new dog on her lap, that yes, Mom was fine, nothing to worry about.
    But she took forever to descend the stairs that night fordinner which was pork chops seared gold with garlic potatoes prepared by Dad who was wearing the same stained clothes. When Remy asked what was wrong he spoke with food mashed in his mouth, said she was sick, an illness, old age, How about we don’t talk about it right now , we went over this before, okay? Play with your new dog . Several times during dinner Mom was given the spitting cloth for the red drizzling her chin and throat. Her face looked scared, almost childish, and pained in a way that made Remy tell herself she would do anything to help, even sacrifice herself.
    A loud bang and Remy says, “Buildings coming from the city? Dig around more, hurry.”
    Dog Man doesn’t look up, his nose buried inside a cone of dirt.
    Remy has had nights where she can’t sleep, thinking about her parents, Brother, the family