Zan stumbled to her feet. The goat was not back. The goat needed her. She had to find the goat. Without bothering to flick on a lamp, she pulled on rain boots, grabbed a slicker in one hand and the lantern and rope in the other, and plunged into the gathering storm. She left the radio by her bed. Its red light was a blinking eye, unseeing.
Wind thwacked the flag Zan had forgotten to lower as if it were one solid sheet beating against another. She could smell rain gathering. The ocean’s brim flickered, incandescent. Waves melded with thunder.
Boots slapping her shins, she ran for the north side. Raindrops splattered singly, and then in a great, torrential rush. Zan pushed through dripping boughs, slipped on lichened rock. She slowed her pace.
“Nan!” she shouted to the storm. “Nan!”
Zan hurled herself down the path without seeing it. Roots grabbed her feet. With each stream crossing and each squeeze through looming boulders, images of horrors the goat might face built, flickering through the lantern-lit rain as if cranked on a film reel. The goat bloated, washed onto shore. The goat crumpled, rotting at the bottom of a ravine. A goat made all of fire, charred beyond all recognizable goat-ness.
The visions crumbled at their edges, blackened, kindling more visions. Zan could not feel her feet beneath her. Branches clawed her face. Her breath was ragged, metallic at the back of her throat. The ache in her chest was unbearable.
Flames licked closer. Rows of skeleton houses collapsed in scarlet and blazing gold. Mountainsides exploded into smoke as if volcanic. A child’s face—her child’s face—dark with soot. A man, hunched against raining embers. His body could not shield their child. Zan’s own hands reached for what she could not save. If only she had been the one carrying their son. The fire could have claimed her, too.
Zan threw herself forward until her legs failed. The lantern launched from her fingers, landing deep in a thicket. Sprawled in the moss, she panted. Imagined fire faded. Stillness held her.
No sound but the patter of rain in pine needles. No light but a sliver from the lantern. No voices. No heat. No smoke.
Zan lay for what could have been minutes, hours, days, a year. She pressed both hands to her chest, trying to ease what was there. There was no warm, bony head to nudge her palm. If tears fell, she could not have told them apart from the rain. Even in her slicker, every inch of her was soaked. The heaviness pulled her closer to the wet earth, the boundary between her body and the ground beneath blurring. Zan curled in on herself. Her arms wrapped around her torso as if she could hold what was dissolving.
Cold tugged her back. Her eyes opened. Pushing herself to elbows and knees, Zan crawled forward to the lantern. She stood.