Other words you pronounced not as an Oklahoman, but rather as a Zoe, like the place where Dorothy and Toto get taken by the tornado, which you called Uz, as opposed to Oz. Uz, like the land of Job, although we knew nothing yet of Job or his torments

**

At dawn the next day Amy calls her grandparents, who are annoyed to be awakened but who come to pick her up

At dawn the next day Amy calls her grandparents, who are annoyed to be awakened but who come to pick her up. She goes upstairs when they get there and lies in bed all day listening to the sirens of the ambulances heading up to the hospital and the birds in the backyard. She thinks of when she and Zoe played rock-paper-scissors and how Zoe used to cheat, and how mad she used to get at her. She thinks of the Saint Patrick’s Day when their dad took them to get a package of pizza crust mix and some sauce and cheese, and the three of them made pizza that they dyed the crust of green, using the food coloring their mom kept on a silver-colored tray in the cabinet, while she was at work. But her mom said the pizza looked disgusting, and she wouldn’t eat it, but then their dad said good because there’d be more for them. Zoe had laughed and laughed.

She follows the cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Nobody really calls her Wonderkid anymore. Everyone just says Amy if they say anything.

When they turn the news on downstairs, Amy rolls over and covers her head with a pillow, but she can still hear it. She thinks about the fairy tales their grandma used to read them, how scared they’d get. She scoots out from underneath the pillow and turns over again. She watches the ceiling until it begins to get dark.

Suddenly seized by something, she picks up a pillow, wrings its middle, and hurls it against the wall. She thinks how Anna Karenina lay down in front of a train. How Vronsky tried to shoot himself in the heart. 

In the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs and takes her grandpa’s car keys from the big ceramic bowl in the hallway and drives east

In the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs and takes her grandpa’s car keys from the big ceramic bowl in the hallway and drives east. In the headlights the tar marks on the roads look like the splatters after animals. But Amy only thinks about where she is going because she doesn’t want to get lost. She keeps the map of everything illuminated in her mind. She reaches the cemetery after about half an hour, and she drives straight to his grave. She turns the car off and slides down onto the ground. She shuts the door on her arm, forty or fifty or sixty times, trying to work up a bruise. She lies down on the ground, and then she gets up, and gets back into the car. The windows in it are automatic, and she thinks how if they drove off a bridge in a car with automatic windows she might not be able to get them down in time to get out and save Zoe.

When she gets home she sneaks into the downstairs bathroom and carefully pops open the bottle of painkillers her sister left at Christmas. With the pills in her fist she tiptoes back up the stairs. When she turns the corner for a second she thinks she sees Zoe. But then her eyes adjust, and it’s just a pillow lying crooked in the bed.