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roll I’d found with the plates in the cupboard of a church.
    â€œWithout the ship . . .” Marvin said.
    â€œThe ship will come.”
    â€œSandy. We can’t do this. We won’t survive this way.”
    â€œIf she was our child . . .”
    Marvin paused. “Maybe we’d eat her,” he said, his voice harder than I’d ever heard it before, and he went back into the house.
    I stared at the slammed door. When I heard the bush rustle behind me, I turned toward the sound, but the night was dark. The moon a waxing crescent. I wanted to call out to you— Melissa —shout your name like my mother did during summer twilight, the sun setting fire to the corn stalks. But I kept silent. All I could do was hope you’d come before the animals.

4 City
    Marvin’s eyes scanned the dark cross-hatch of intersections, assessed figures that slipped out of doorways. Most kept moving but when a few remained, standing in a lopsided triangle on a low stone step, he turned abruptly to cross the street, corralling me with his body. Around us, the buildings grew taller. In the wealth­iest area, near where I used to work, the sidewalk was littered with dead birds that had flown into the skyscrapers so we moved into the gutter to avoid the crunch of their little bones. I pointed out the Parthenon offices and watched as Marvin’s gaze climbed the glass exterior and fell back to the front doorway, its glass smashed in. A closed-circuit camera lay in the entranceway, red and green wires pulled out like entrails, and I thought of the mice our barn cats sometimes left at the back door. “Impressive,” Marvin said as we continued past a row of cut-open streetlights, all the copper stripped, into a poorer part of the city where prostitutes lingered, their eyes dismissing us, and as I began to sober up, I started second-guessing myself, thinking that this was likely a mistake, taking an unknown journey with a strange man I’d just met.
    In our lives now, on this island, there is little room for self-doubt, probably because our well-being doesn’t depend so much on our own decisions, the directions we choose, but on other forces like the weather, the people around us, our capacity to work. That night, though, I’d made a choice and realized too late I might regret it.
    â€œHow did you meet Margo?” I asked, trying to lighten the heavy silence.
    â€œShe told me about you,” he said, his voice a low whisper like we were moving through a giant’s house, trying to avoid waking it up. “But you aren’t what I expected.”
    â€œWhat were you expecting?”
    He shrugged, but I thought I knew: someone tougher, more like Margo. What he said, though, surprised me. “She didn’t say you’d be so pretty.” I glanced into the street and blushed.
    â€œYou can’t take a compliment?”
    â€œSure,” I said, and we were silent. We walked a ways before Marvin turned suddenly into an alley. I hesitated at the open mouth. “Come on,” he coaxed. Beside me, the steel door of a strip club swung open and a man tumbled out, his watery red eyes fastening to mine. Our gaze held for a split second before I moved, following Marvin down the greasy tunnel that smelled putrid and dusky, like urine and rotten garbage.
    The alley was a shortcut that Marvin took to forage for bottles and anything else that might make him money—or so he said. He dug a couple of green glass bottles out of an aluminum garbage can and turned his back to me so I could slip them in his pack. After that, we headed south, and as we walked, he scuffed the soles of his shoes against the sidewalk, sending chunks of ice and grit into the gutter. We passed a sugar factory with silent smokestacks, windows clear of glass. In the distance I saw the closed highway overpass, chunks of rubble around its footings. I slipped a hand into my coat pocket, wishing for a