The police chief’s wife sits at my mother’s feet, braiding grass into an anklet. She is rounder and older than my mother’s friends. She has Sandy Duncan’s haircut in raw umber. She sets my mother’s foot on her calf. “Tell us what it was like,” she says casually. She wants to know so bad. My mother closes her eyes and smiles; behind her, the girlfriends snort and touch each other’s elbows. They eye the jagged scratch marks on my mother’s thighs. They want to know, too. Later, they’ll call her and not mention it, hope that she offers it up—will wrap telephone cords around their fingers and pull them tighter and tighter and tighter.

I stand away from the group on our concrete slab, just a kid girl in flip-flops, back by the picnic table that’s been laid out with offerings. Ambrosia and egg salad glisten under limp sheets of plastic wrap. Someone has carved a swan from a dirty block of ice. There are so many flies on the plate of cold cuts that it looks like a living, breathing organism. I wave my hand over it, but the organism only shivers and then settles again. It seems to rasp out an exhale.

The congregants press themselves in more closely around my mother. They jostle for position. The police chief’s wife clings to her leg. My mother looks ecstatic and then like she might be sick. No one notices. Her girlfriends comb her hair with their fingers; they are openly crying. I look around for someone to help her but know that no one is coming. Where are all the men, I wonder to myself. But I know that the chief of police is busy elsewhere and, anyway, he always comes too late. I know that my own house is cold and dark and empty inside.

Above us, a lapwing the color of oiled steel sits on a power line.

The congregants paw and scratch at each other to keep themselves from touching my mother’s sanctified flesh. They lick their lips. Tears stream from the corners of my mother’s closed eyes, her face a rictus of pleasure or pain. Beside me, the organism yawns. The lapwing is still as calm water.

There is a burst of sound. My mother suddenly twitches and stands, and the congregants all fall away with a collective gulp. The police chief’s wife has pressed her face to the ground and covered her ears with her hands—she doesn’t want to know anything anymore. My mother steps over her, barefoot, into the yard, and opens her body to the lapwing. Her eyes blaze with everything. I follow them and see, for the first time, that the lapwing isn’t looking at her. It is looking at me.

The congregants moan––they are smeared with each other’s blood. My mother moves as if to step forward but hesitates, her glittering eyes on the lapwing. I can tell she is terrified, which makes me terrified. She takes a step toward the lapwing, plants her feet in the grass. She is shaking, sweating, resolute. She opens her throat as if to load a scream. The lapwing gazes away from me and blinks at her, considering. It quirks its head indifferently and flies away.

My mother turns to me, her face as bloodless and beautiful as Helen of Troy. She breathes in deeply through her nose. Her whole body is a message I’m not old enough to understand, her expression deep and complicated as a myth. In her eyes I see a city made of stone, ancient and immovable, indestructible. I sense in the moment that I have been delivered to this city––that the congregants are here for me as much as they are for her––and that it will one day be my duty and birthright to shake this festering city down to rubble, to set a match to any part of it that will burn.

Her eyes pulsate with the vision. But then she softens. She wipes a tear from her cheek in a movement so fluid it seems practiced. There is a weary peace in her smile that I understand is only temporary––it means that we are safe for now and for now is enough. I search the sky for the lapwing but it is nowhere to be seen. She returns to the congregants and they swallow her in their arms.