I opened the heavy oak front door and she returned my gaze with eyes as surprised as mine: the girl who’d made a fool of me in high school, who I’d managed to avoid for ten years even though we both lived in the same small town.

“I’m sorry,” I forced a smile, nearly twisting an ankle in my platform heels as I stepped back. “I was expecting someone else.”

When Ernest came home cradling the egg in his big hands, Mary knew he was up to something. She estimated the egg to be about three inches in length; the density, she found when her smiling husband placed it into her hold, was no more than a light pressure on her palms. The color of it was coffee oversaturated with milk—dirty beige with darker speckles here and there that coalesced into an opaque brownness on the fat bottom.

“Pretty egg, huh? Just like your favorite,” Ernest said with a smile, tapping her arm with his index finger the way he did when he was nervous. “The birds you like, I mean.”

On the new moon in Leo, go to the park. Meet a friend who practices shamanic healing and sit awhile talking on the soft grass dotted with clover as storm clouds slowly cover up the blue summer sky. Watch swallows dart low over the grass and feel the expectant energy in the air. Walk up to the little hill by the quarry, through a narrow path overgrown with grasses and thistles and brambles and rosebay willow herb abuzz with bees.

His knuckles knocked out an irritated rhythm on the table, miming the tap-tap of her Mac keys. There is blood, Vinny thought she had heard him saying.

Her eyes flicked up from the paragraph she was furiously typing and confronted the narrowed eyes of her son—dark fuzz over lips, framed by lank parted hair growing down to his nape—now questioning her. The sneer dominated, because the rest of his face was obscured by long fringes he had to keep swinging out of the way. Having got her attention, he jerked his curtained face towards the washroom door, the door he had banged shut seconds before, that she, in her creative flow, had completely ignored.

Our house was filled with the scent of their lives: fading lilacs from a bush which overhung their drive; chickens, clucking in the gravel for bits of corn. The carnal smell of earth overturned, heaved up brown and cool to receive the seeds thrust inside.

Niha yanks a comb through her long, jet-colored locks, roughly undoing the twists and snarls that fan from her head like snakes. Appa rummages around in the kitchen somewhere, the clang of pots and pans reverberating through the whole apartment.

He’ll burn the whole place down if I don’t check what he’s doing, Niha thinks to herself, though she doesn’t move.

Her father starts to call out her name but bites the word off at one syllable. She dimly overhears a muttered curse before the din starts again, a war of cast iron and stainless steel waged in her tiny, sparsely-equipped kitchen.

Limestone, shale, and granite. At a pond in Eastern Oklahoma. I sit at the foot of a pond with a long, narrow fly fishing dock. Brown clumps of wasps’ homes stick to its steel roof. I grasp at rocks on the shoreline. Some of them are round, others jagged. A few have mossy patches, others indentations that I will myself to believe are fossils of a bygone era. I envision tiny fish and bugs and trilobites, trying to imagine what the world looked like then, all colorful and explosive. My nails are caked with mud. When I reach into the stagnant water, my mother shrieks and pulls out my hand.

Glass jars line the porch from 7 a.m. Later, when the sun dips from view, Lila darts outside and tightens each lid. “Still warm,” she says between grunts.

“Eh?” As Granny turns away from the dirt-dusted street, the ice in her cup cracks against the plastic.

“We’re gonna be rich, Granny. Richer than … race car drivers.”

Granny sucks a sound from the space between her tongue and cheek. “Stop stealing my jars. I need them for jam.”