left arm free of the sling, she held the canteen in front of her with both hands like a shield. Spiders could jump. Anna had seen the smallest of them jump several inches. For a being less than a quarter of an inch wide, including legs, that was a prodigious feat. A tarantula the size of the one she’d seen hit the sand the night before could probably jump five feet or more.
“I will squash you like a bug,” she said to the black bead in the weeds and shook the canteen to show she meant it.
The plants quivered again, and a second black bead revealed itself.
Anna raised the canteen over her head.
The grasses moved, and a pointed black snout emerged between the beads. Both black eyes were fixed on her. Anna didn’t move. She’d stopped breathing.
Cautiously, a tiny skunk kit poked its nose from the sere foliage, then dared a paw, then another. It was no bigger than Anna’s hand, coal black with two white stripes originating above its eyes and streaming over the fur of its back to a plume of tail.
The cry in the night that Anna had thought sounded like a small animal must have been just that; the erratic scratching sounds, the paws of coyotes as they attacked and killed the mother skunk. The kit was too small to have been on his own. When the coyotes attacked, this little guy must have fled into the mouth of her jar for safety, then tumbled down. The kit couldn’t weigh more than a pound, and he’d landed on soft sand. The impact must have been minimal. He didn’t appear to be hurt, just frightened of the enormous bipedal beast whose den he found himself in.
No, Anna corrected herself, not frightened, more interested. Had he been frightened, she thought, he was supposed to turn away and point his bottom at her so he could spray. Chances were he’d never seen a person and was more curious than fearful.
“Hey, buddy,” she said softly as she lowered the canteen and laid it gently on the sand. The little animal flinched but didn’t run back behind the datura leaves. Stilling herself, she let her eyes wander, pretending she had little interest in him but sneaking glances. Watching the ball of fluff sniff around, exploring this new place with increasing confidence, she experienced a sensation she hadn’t felt for so long it took her a moment to identify it.
Delight.
She was delighted. That an animal she could fit in a pocket, a wild creature, and a skunk to boot, could bring so much life into the jar that the air seemed brighter, the walls more cozy than forbidding, and her heart no longer too heavy to beat, amazed her.
Soon, she knew, she would worry about how to keep her new friend alive. How much drugged water would be too much and shut down his heart? Should she try to capture him and throw him up the neck of the jar into the real world before he perished from thirst? Or was he too young to survive in the world above without his mama? Like the writers of
Soon. Soon she would worry. For now she was content to sit, head resting against the stone, and revel in the tiny perfect creature toddling around on the sand.
Anna was no longer alone.
SIXTEEN
Anna’s false sun moved through her sandstone universe, crawling down one side of the jar, creeping across the bottom, and lapping at the other side. On the surface of the earth the temperature was probably in the nineties; in the perpetual shade of the jar, Anna was not uncomfortable. No longer plagued by fear, and drifting on the low- level effects of sipping drugged water, it occurred to her that Nature wasn’t as harsh as she’d thought when she’d come to Glen Canyon. It was Man’s fighting against it that made it hard.
A woman—even a drugged and broken stage manager—who embraced it could find comforts. Solitude— something she’d dreaded since Zachary had gone—was, in truth, beautiful. Not loneliness, but freedom from people. How could she be lonely while Buddy delicately explored her toes with his snout and one wee paw?
The skunk kit wandered off to find something better than toes with which to play. A strange piece of music filtered through Anna’s memory. Glenn Branca, she thought.
Human emotion was the razor: slights, sneers, mockery, love, hope, desire. All cut in their own way. Those wounds spawned their own cuts in actions taken, understandings and misunderstandings, then in the remembering.
Not so in solitude.
The prison of the jar she’d feared and loathed was simply stone. She was there uninvited. It neither hated nor loved nor cared. Today she found in it shelter from the sun; tonight, from the cold. Monsters and thirst and starvation were not part of the sandstone; they were of humanity, of the razors. The stone itself was pure, enduring. It had no ambition. It did not plot or pine, trap or torment. Rain deepened it, sand blew in, cold sheared flakes from its walls, torrents carved canyons, and forests poked roots into its crevices. Form changed without resentment, loss, or lust.
Bizarrely, given that she was probably going to die soon one way or another—and none of them pleasant— Anna was more at peace than she had been since she’d last lain in Zach’s arms, oblivious to the fact that the end of her world was nigh.
The canteen was resting upright in a trench of sand she’d made. So far as she’d noticed, the cap didn’t leak, but water—even poisoned water—was too precious a commodity to take chances with. Tipping the canteen, she filled the cap and poured it over her tongue. Using the cap as a measure, she found she could control her consumption to a certain extent. At least her parched innards had less of a chance to override her will and gulp it down.
Buddy turned at the sound—or maybe the smell. His tiny black nose had grayed. Part of it was dust from his explorations, but, Anna guessed, some was because his nose must be drying out. He took several steps in her direction, then stopped, gazing up at her, his nose twitching.
“I’m afraid to, Buddy. I don’t know what’s in it, what it would do to someone as small as you,” she said miserably. “I would if I could. When I get us out, you shall have a mastiff-sized bowl in your room at all times. I promise.”
Anna heard the words come into her ears. In this hole in the ground she had managed to undress and rebury a body, dress herself, stay moderately sane, make a sling for her arm, and acquire a pet skunk. Though drugged to the gills, she had made the attempt to hide her clothes when noises came from above. What she had not even considered was that she could get out. First, she’d hoped the rangers would come get her out, then she’d resigned herself to—to what? To living and dying in a buff-and-peach-colored bottle like a short-lived genie with a bra that didn’t fit and no harem pants?
Could she get herself and Buddy out? Gathering the foggy tendrils of thought back from the drug marshes muddying her brain, she tried to focus. Moqui steps; that was what the park historian called the shallow toe- and fingerholds carved into the sides of some of the rock around the lake. The ancient peoples made them so they could travel to and from the river more easily.
The cap of the canteen was metal and had a small-linked metal chain that attached it to the mouth. Tin probably, a soft metal. Still, it might do to scrape away the soft sandstone.
Granules of sand hit her cheek and dragged her from her thoughts. Buddy was digging furiously. Since it was not right where the corpse was interred, Anna didn’t stop him. For all she knew, skunks could be like cats and dig holes to use as latrines.
Lying back, the canteen pressed into service as a headrest, she studied the body of the jar—a space she had done nothing but study for days. It was shaped rather like a turnip, round and full at the bottom, then curving into a narrow point that veered off at an angle, before opening to the sky.
Moqui steps wouldn’t work. A strong person, with two good arms, might be able to climb them on a ninety-
