Sublime

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone.

grok,”

People from another planet will wonder what’s wrong with earthly names, that it takes so many different ones to tag a thing. But here he lies, alongside this friend he has known only weeks, joined again after so many lifetimes. Nick and Olivia, Watchman and Maidenhair—the complete quartet of them—open to the January night, under topless columns of

Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood.