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this place for finding points of reference, orientation, place for protractors and slide-rule calculations, place for not being lost—and that’s where she found the book, Handwörterbuch der Naturwissenshaften, 1933, and Chance’s eyes moving absently down a yellowed page, detailed engravings of trilobites, and they had always been her favorite fossils, her grandmother’s specialty. There were hundreds or thousands of the petrified arthropods tucked away in cabinets and drawers throughout the house, most smaller than a thumbnail, but a few giants over a foot long. And so nothing out of the ordinary about this page, German and Latin, Devonian trilobites of the subfamily Miraspidinae, illustrations of fossils from Africa and Oklahoma, and way down at the bottom of the page Chance found the word, the name she’d scribbled in the back of Dandelion Wine three nights before, Dicranurus, and a circle drawn around four of the illustrations in faded red pencil, four views of the trilobite and a red circle like a fairy charm to contain the drawings inside. Dicranurus monstrosus, the specimen figured from Oulmes, Morocco, coiled like a tiny gargoyle on the page; spines so long they might as well be tentacles and the twin projections that spiraled like ram’s horns from its head. A chill along her arms, then the back of her neck like a gust of cold air and one finger cautiously crossing the red circle, another half second and Chance would have touched the image of the creature itself, but someone started hammering at the door. “Chance? Are you in there, honey? Chance? You should come out and eat something.”
    And she closed the book, slammed it shut and put it away, had long ago learned the exact position of every book in the library so it wasn’t hard to find the empty place where it belonged. “I’m coming,” she called to the voice behind the door. “I’ll be out in a moment,” and always meaning to come back to the book later, always meaning to ask her grandfather about the ugly little trilobite held within the red circle, but in time she forgot it, and forgot the dream of a night sky that leaked steaming, oilslick tears.

    Three months before her grandfather’s heart attack, the violent last gasps of spring on the scalding heels of summer, and the day she broke up with Deacon there were tornadoes, black and twisting clouds touching down all the way from Arkansas to Georgia. Civil defense sirens going off like doomsday, and she gave him the news outside the cruddy, little bar where he spent so much of his time. The place where he sat and drank himself stupid and numb so he didn’t have to face the world. All the weeks it had taken her to find the nerve, the careful, padded words, to end something that was already over; Deacon listened, and when she was finished he shrugged his bony shoulders, ran the fingers of one hand through his hair and looked up at the angry sky.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Okay, whatever,” so calm, so fucking resigned, and she wanted to hit him then, all his drunkard’s bullshit and even the sleeping around on her and that was the first time she’d ever wanted to hit him.
    “Jesus, is that all you have to say to me? Three goddamn years and that’s all you can think of to say to me?” And he just smiled a little, then, stubbly bum’s smile for her, and he rubbed hard at his chin.
    “What do you want me to say, Chance? You know I’m not going to change your mind, and I don’t feel like arguing with you right now,” and so she left him standing there, turned around and stalked quickly, determinedly, away; most of the things she’d meant to say left unspoken, the disbelief at what he’d done with Elise and the sloppy, half-assed way he’d tried to lie about it, the straw that broke the camel’s back. All the soursharp anger still bottled up hot behind her eyes, and she walked all the way home through the siren wail and thunder- and lightning-scented wind.
    And hours later, almost dark