The house, the hillsides, and the forest continued to grow more vivid month by month. The dewy grass beneath my feet was so lush, I could feel it driving up through the core of my body with each step, jabbing long and ticklish into my throat. The rain slapping against the house poured down the gutters and soaked my clothing, plastered my hair to my neck and face. I ran, sweat wicked away in the downpour, leaving me hot beneath a breathless cold that made gooseflesh of my skin. The smell of pine and ozone and rich loamy soil was thick all around, rain clattering on the roof, drumming hollow against the wooden porch, pebbling the pond.

The dark sky popped, streaked bright and luminous with an electric vein, a thin white tendril unfurling across the sky. I ran toward the sound of thunder, feet sinking into the muddy pine bed, and I lay in the fullness of the forest gasping, wanting it to fall down around me or burst into flame and swallow me.

When Dare came home I was sitting in my wet clothes on the porch.

“Why’d you kill them?” I asked him again.

He said, “That was on you, Bone. You did it.”

“I didn’t. I’d never have done anything like that in my life.”

“Yeah?” He was unimpressed. “What was the ammonium nitrate for?”

“Not for frogs.”

“For what, then?”

“What’s the gold for? What’s the guns for? What’s the grow lights for? What’s the motherfucking venison jerky for? What’s the saved-up seeds and topographical maps and animal pelts for?”

“For living,” he said. “It’s for living.”