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shallow, until I was only half awake.
    Neddy Nelson: Isn’t that why the government pushed to port everybody? Because weren’t too many people Party Crashing to mess with history?
    Irene Casey: The air smelled like clean water in a clear glass on a hot day. The ice smelled like nothing. The dirt, froze stiff. The river, froze solid. No wind. Like we was outside of time. Nothing happening except us.
    He said how boy sperms swim faster, but don’t live as long as the girl sperms, and his breath smelled like a burp after you’ve ate pork sausage for breakfast.
    I said I had to pee.
    And he said, “When we’re done.”
    Neddy Nelson: Don’t you know about the covert government effect? People aren’t even aware it’s boosting, but doesn’t the effect keep you stuck here so you can’t mess with history?
    Irene Casey: I remember I told him how sorry I was for peeing on him. Peeing on both of us. But it hurt so bad, and the cold air made the hurt worse. Those days, walking out, I’d layer maybe nine, maybe ten pair of panties. To give me hips till I’d fill out.
    I didn’t want to, but when he worked my zipper down and slipped his cold thumb inside all those panties, inside me, I peed. All hot, creeping through my jeans and underwear. The hot wicking up the yarn of my sweater. The rest of me, ice cold.
    In the dirt, in my Christmas sweater, with this man crushing the air out of me, calling me “the mother of the future,” I couldn’t picture how this’d get any worse.
    I remember him turning his hand in front of my face, his fingers wet and steaming in the cold, and me saying, “I’m sorry.” I said, “We’re safe.”
    His wet fingers inside me, I kept calling him “mister.” Kept saying, “Those dogs are long gone.”
    Neddy Nelson: Don’t Historians call it “Oblivion,” the place without place, where time’s stopped. The place outside of time.
    Irene Casey: This man brung one knee up to my chest, like to kneel on me, and he brung it down, hooking the toe of his black shoe in the crotch of my jeans. As he stomped the jeans and panties down around my socks and ankles, in that instant, I remembered how many folks were sat down to Christmas dinner at my house. Too many for my mother to ever miss me.
    Echo Lawrence: The Easter egg that Rant left for me, he’d written on it with white wax, so that when I soaked it in dye I could read his hidden message.
    Irene Casey: Worse than Basin Carlyle fouling you, nailing you too hard, down there with a dodgeball in phys ed. Worse than the cramps. That punching, pushing, shoving inside, it hurts. Gritty and grinding with dirty water, the ice, melted under me. That thin part of ice, turned to mud puddled under me.
    I pictured fabric, stuck in one place, stabbed again and again in a big, slow sewing machine.
    My arms wrapped tight as a baby or a mummy, just-born or dead-helpless, the man moved on top of me, faster, until he stopped, and every muscle and joint of him turned hard as stone, froze.
    Then all of him went loose, relaxed, but he didn’t let go. His fingers kept a hold of me.
    His heart slowed, and he said, “It didn’t happen, not yet. To be safe,” the man said, “we’ll need to go again.”
    Echo Lawrence: Instead of dye, I dropped the egg in a cup of coffee. After I drank the coffee, the egg sat there in the bottom of the paper cup, Rant’s words telling me: “In three days, I’ll return from the dead.” Some kind of Easter quote.
    Irene Casey: While the man waited, he sniffed his hand and said, “You smell just like your mama and grandma and great-grandma smelled at your age…”
    Nothing moved. Nothing barked.
    “Have this baby,” he whispered, his mouth on top of my eyes, his lips on my shut-tight eyelids, “and you’ll be the most famous mother in all of history…”
    Down there, he was moving again, pressing me into the ice, through the ice into the river, and he said, “You don’t have this baby and I’ll come back to make you