Kristina Ten

Kristina Ten

Kamchatka

The child tried, and the mother, for her part, let him. She waited on the shore while her cub splashed gracelessly through the shallows. The ring of white around his neck made him look like some high-ranking member of English nobility. The guide, Ivan, had explained about natal collars on first-year cubs during the flight to Kurile Lake that morning, but between his brisk, accented English and the whirring blades, and the way Meesh’s breakfast sloshed just under her ears every time the chopper pitched toward this vast caldera or that massive volcano, she hadn’t held onto the details.

The mother bear waded in after the cub and had a stilled salmon between her teeth in seconds. That’s right, thought Meesh, that’s exactly right. You humor the kid while he plays hunter, but you don’t let yourself starve over it.

Her eyes found the Ilyinsky volcano’s reflection in the water and traced it up to its origin, a distant conical giant glittering with snow. The last of the previous winter or the first of the coming one, Meesh couldn’t be sure. Winter was three of the four seasons in Kamchatka.

“Remarkable,” breathed Francis, so suddenly it nearly sent Meesh off the viewing platform. Francis was quiet quiet, from his years of birding all over the American Southwest, about which he’d already bragged several times to the group. Not that anyone had listened, on account of Emmanuel existing. Emmanuel had finished second on the most recent season of the popular wilderness survival show Backlands, but the way everyone flitted around him, you’d think he’d won it. He’d gained most of the weight back since filming, trimmed his beard. He had this habit of rubbing his palm over his jawbone as if feeling for the once-there hair, rubbing it back and forth, back and forth, in a way Meesh was sure made everyone think of fucking.

Made her think of fucking, anyway.

And not that Meesh had known any of them very long, but she could tell the last thing anybody thought about when they thought about fucking was? Francis.

Francis, in a deep squat, mere inches away now, his telephoto lens all but perched on her right shoulder, and the devil there telling Meesh: Helga-Pataki-punch this nut. But hold on. Say this tour had a zero-tolerance policy and Meesh managed to get herself kicked off on day two? The nearest city was forty minutes by helicopter, the nearest airport a bumpy bus slog from there, down the region’s only paved road. “Paved road” being a generous term for it. And even if she got out of the nature park without being arrested for traveling sans guide or ecological permit, even if she caught the local bus on its anyone’s-guess schedule, flights to Anchorage departed only twice a week. And that was in high season. Meesh squinted in the direction of Francis’s camera lens, at the big bear vice-gripping the salmon between her paws. The cub leaned against his mother as she worked the flesh. He tongued lazily at the air between them, where bite-size pink chunks soon appeared, as if by magic.

The idea had been that Meesh wouldn’t have to see a single other living thing. But it turned out living things were just about everywhere. Even in 200° water. Even in the second-most densely concentrated geyser field on Earth.

Kamchatka Beasts and Bubblers, the tour was called. Last one with any spots left by the time she looked. Sixteen days in the remote reaches of the Russian Far East, home to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summers and numbing sub-arctic winds the rest of the year. Twenty-nine active volcanoes over a landmass the size of Sweden. The peninsula, shaped like a fish with a bite taken out of its head, faced away from the continent and toward Japan, as if recognizing the untenability of its extreme conditions and trying to get away from itself.

Meesh would’ve found it sooner had she not rabbit-holed on Tanzania’s Lake Natron, with its surface so red it could’ve been downriver from Sweeney Todd. Water so alkaline it could burn straight through human skin and eyes—despite being the annual breeding ground for nearly three million lesser flamingos. Too bad Scott had this weird affinity for flamingos. Knew too many facts about their knees, made a point to see them first every time at the zoo.

Other searches for “world’s most inhospitable places” led Meesh to the Australian Outback (only she sunburned too easily), Brazil’s Snake Island (illegal for civilians to visit), Death Valley (too close to home), Yellowstone (even closer). She and Scott had, at some point, made abstract plans for a trip to the Sahara: sunset sandboarding, blankets so thin you could feel the desert’s ups and downs under your spine, this stupid vision of them riding two-up on a camel. And the trouble with Antarctica was the bestseller that had come out last year. Scott hadn’t read it, but Meesh had basically recounted the book to him beat by beat. Which meant he knew all about the protagonist (a woman who’d run away from her life via an Antarctic cruise) and, as a bonus, he’d started having fantasies about getting hired as a field engineer at McMurdo.

Scott worked in mergers and acquisitions, which put him about as far as you can be from a construction site on the South Pole. When their Roomba started acting funny, he just bought a new one, like what you do when your kid’s cat dies and you’d rather not stumble through the whole unseemly circle- of-life conversation, and, really, the SPCA is right there. Then he came home and placed the new Roomba in the charging dock as if it’d always been there, as if Meesh wouldn’t notice the missing scratches from the time their previous one fell down the stairs.

So: not exactly the resident handyman. But: the reason there was always enough in their joint account to take off.

For Kamchatka: five thousand glorious miles away, the last of those miles accessible only through a bewildering combination of chopper, military-grade half-track, and dogsled. So isolated that when she’d typed out the names of spcific lodges, the search engine had come up empty and suggested that perhaps she, the real-life human idiot, must’ve spelled something wrong.

And who knew? Maybe if she went far enough east, she’d find a time zone where what happened hadn’t. Or where it had happened so long ago that, by now, she hardly remembered.

“The ground is screaming,” Ivan the guide couldn’t have said. Meesh must’ve misheard him. There was something about the way he transmogrified his “i”s into “ee”s and nearly swallowed half his wispy beard with each vowel.

But then Rebecca the Finnish linguist frowned back at the group, crossed her finger over her lips, and said, “Listen.”

In the absence of clinking carabiners, in the stark new quiet, Meesh was suddenly too aware of her rasping breaths. It made textbook sense why everyone else was there. Francis was chasing the colony of spectacled guillemot that his birding app had promised would be waiting on Kamchatka’s rocky coast. Emmanuel was working out the kinks in his patented off-grid incineration toilet before it went to market. Rebecca was on a university grant, studying the endangered dialects of the Eveny, a nomadic people who apparently had fifteen hundred different words for “reindeer”: one for those most vulnerable to wolf attacks, another for those that would come right up to you and lick the salt off your hands. Among the rest were a married couple who’d themed their wedding around a shared love of angling (tackle-box cake, fish in the boutonnieres), a trio of alpinists, plus Paul, a daredevil botanist who told them, eyes aglimmer, that he’d always been willing to go to the ends of the earth for his research—and for a particular species of monkshood, to the end of the earth he’d come.

On the other hand, Meesh once saw a common stink bug on the opposite side of the apartment and, with one foot, recast the new Roomba as an exterminating machine. No, she wasn’t an extreme anything. Earlier, passing an immense hot spring—a fathomless sapphire edged with painterly bands of copper and gold—she was reminded she didn’t even like long baths. The prickly sensation of heat forced her to confront the fragility of her body, the useless defense that was her so-called barrier of skin. And yet, every time her life underwent a major shift, she experienced this overwhelming urge to return to the land. No breakup haircut for her, thanks. But sign her up for the hiking meetup, the foraging class, the psychedelic-assisted treehouse meditation. As if the land would somehow save her.

As if she, lifelong city girl, and the land had ever been that close.

Cresting the ridge overlooking the Valley of Geysers, Meesh realized Ivan was right: the ground here was screaming. The geysers’ intermittent gurgling was the dominant sound, but when she listened closely, just underneath it, like the harmony line, was a soft, persistent seething.

“Fumaroles,” Ivan explained, pointing to the columns of steam that Meesh had, from the chopper, mistaken for wildfires. “How the heat gets out when the thermal feature has no water in its system.”

Emmanuel made a comment about backed-up plumbing that made everybody laugh.

Meesh’s head felt too big for her skull. This leg of the tour had a rotten-egg smell that rocketed her back to the humiliating days of subsidized summer camp, and everywhere she looked there were splotches of radioactive orange, making her feel like her internal contrast levels were off. She couldn’t catch her breath, the volume of the fumaroles rising in her ears. Not far from one of the springs, a trail of hoofprints formed drunken loop-de-loops. Some animal for whom the luxury of a sauna outweighed the risk of being boiled alive.

Though, come to think of it, the animal must have been moving away from the spring. And, if the distance between prints was any indication, moving fast. Because you couldn’t build a safety fence around every scalding body of water in Kamchatka, and because children were too brave for their own good, having had insufficient time in which to experience pain, Beasts and Bubblers was strictly eighteen and up. The angling couple, who’d left their young son at home, remarked on how much the crackling coming from one shallow pool sounded like his favorite Pop Rocks.

A far cry from IncrEdible Fungi of the Rocky Mountains, Meesh mused.

This land seemed needful, angry.

Well, let it squeal all it wanted. At least here it wasn’t her problem.

In the thick haze of one of the smaller fumaroles, Meesh found reason to let slip a scream back.

“Mermaid” was the nearest word Meesh could summon, and as soon as she said it, she knew it was utterly wrong, too.

Ivan, having finally unstuck the room’s one small window, was attempting to circulate fresh air using a complicated series of hand motions that made Meesh think of park tai chi. The cook, Oks, crouched at the foot of the cot, aromas of parsley and black peppercorn wafting from the bowl in her hands.

“The hike was difficult,” Ivan said, kindly omitting for you. “You are overheated.”

Rebecca sat on the other cot, legs drawn all the way under her like a squirmy child at story hour. Everyone else was down the hall, beta testing Emmanuel’s incineration toilet.

“People faint when they’re overheated. They don’t scream.” This from Rebecca, who had introduced herself the first day as “a doctor but not a doctor doctor,” and since then done everything she could to take it back. The open notebook on her lap, the thoughtful pen-tapping against her chin, did nothing to soften the effect.

“She was in one of the springs,” Meesh said again, knowing that if she didn’t repeat this once every three to five minutes, she’d stop believing it. “She was . . . burning.”

Ivan grimaced. Rebecca scribbled. Oks abandoned the soup and scooched closer to Meesh, who was immediately distracted by how good the cook’s hair smelled. Like coal smoke, raw honey, toast.

“There is a story about these women.” Oks fingered the pendant in her collarbone ditch. “They are called kupalki.”

“Oksana,” Ivan warned, then switched to Russian before remembering Rebecca was in the room, switched back to English to say only, for some reason, the word “blog,” then gave up and settled for crossing his arms and staring gloomily out the window.

Oks shot him the imperious look of the person controlling the flow of food in this operation.“The story,” she continued, “is that kupalki were once angels. One day, they conspired together against God, and for this sin they fell from heaven. Because their sin was so great, they were doomed to fall farther and harder than all others.”

Rebecca was nodding so fast Meesh couldn’t look at her without feeling seasick.

“Many fallen angels walk the earth. They are wicked and destitute, unable to fly. But the kupalki fell with such force that they went through the earth, into the waters beneath it. They are seen sometimes in the places where the water is pushed up.”

“Springs,” Rebecca whispered.

Oks nodded. “Actually, those we have here are the safest because they are so hot. Kupalki cannot travel far from the water. It is in the cooler springs, where swimming is permitted, that people are most at risk.”

“So, these ‘angels’ that fell all at once,” Rebecca started in, without looking up from her notebook. “Would some say that’s how sites like the Valley of Geysers were formed?”

Ivan pushed off the windowsill, unable to contain the fact of his hard-earned degree in geophysics any longer. “As I have said, the Valley of Geysers was formed when a volcano collapsed more than forty thousand years ago.”

Oks shrugged noncommittally. “Recently, miners at Oginskaya discovered fragments of teeth among the gold in their machines.”

“Oksana,” Ivan objected.

“Not human teeth,” Oks added. “And not identifiable as any local animal.” “Oksana!”

Rebecca looked like she might rip a hole through her paper.

Feeling another wave of dizziness coming in, Meesh rolled side to side on the cot, burying first her left ear, then her right into the pillow. Trying to hear less of whatever she was hearing. Earlier, Ivan had left out that detail about the hike being difficult only for those who were as unprepared as she was. But Meesh had left out something too.

The creature she’d seen had not been, in truth, burning. The creature hadn’t appeared to be in any pain at all.

She was half submerged and turned toward Meesh, skin a loose mat of yellow fleece. She was emitting the steam vent’s high, tea-kettle hiss.

And despite not having a face exactly, she was smiling.

“Perhaps you are traveling for a sibling’s wedding,” the tour company’s website had rabidly begun. “Or for a large business conference, or to pitch a successful idea to your boss! Treat yourself to the hottest deals for Kamchatka!”

Or maybe you just need an escape, Meesh had mentally filled in, before tapping the RESERVE NOW button. The little cha-ching her phone made after completing the purchase was drowned out by Scott’s off-key singing in the other room.

Walking through the Eveny settlement, Meesh tried to picture a conference: PowerPoint projected against one of the cottage’s windowless walls, podium set up between the seven-foot bear sculpture and the three-foot bear sculpture, so the speaker looked like the mother in the classic papa-mama-baby bear line-up. Her brain instantly cast Scott in the role of speaker. Meesh had jobs—lots of jobs, sure. It was Scott who had the career.

Ivan had suggested that she rest at home base while the group went to meet the Eveny reindeer herders and Oks went on her restock trip, but the only thing Meesh could stomach less than another helicopter ride was the idea of spending the whole day alone. Kupalki were a myth. Of course. And just in, you know, tribute to that, Meesh was electing to surround herself with real, certified, non-mythical people.

The terrain was different this far north. No more summer-camp smell, no mud pots bubbling like microwave bisque. Wooden walkways connected the village’s half-dozen buildings, narrow enough to demand single file. When Meesh took a wrong step off, her boot sank three inches into waterlogged grass.

The botanist, Paul, pulled her up, then gestured toward a cluster of red sores at the base of a nearby tree. “Amanita muscaria,” he said. Pretty name, Meesh thought, for an infection. “Hallucinogenic,” he went on. “Poisonous, if you have too much. Apparently locals use it as a substitute for alcohol.”

Meesh gave a little chin-scrunch of approval, like: Right, well, I don’t see a bar. By the time the walkway ended, at the base of a small building elevated on four tall posts, a bar was precisely what she needed.

The men had positioned themselves on either side of the carcass and were yanking at it with powerful grunts. The hide, still intact at the head and rump, made the reindeer look like one of those cheap Halloween costumes Meesh had worn in college. The interchangeable sexy-animal ones comprised only of a mask, ears, and tail.

They’d passed the reindeer enclosure at the entrance, before the wildflower walk and the culture museum, far enough back that Meesh wasn’t prepared to see one here. She remembered something she’d heard on a podcast about how cows had to be slaughtered apart from the rest of the herd, because the anxiety of seeing a herd member die caused the other cows to emit a hormone that made their meat taste bad to people.

Emmanuel was telling the alpinists that the storehouse in front of them, built off the ground to evade opportunistic scavengers, was the inspiration for the chicken-legged hut in the tales of Baba Yaga. He’d built something similar, if less sophisticated, on his season of Backlands.

Rebecca was telling someone, maybe even her, Meesh, that the Eveny didn’t have an equivalent for the English word “processing.” Which, naturally, put Rebecca in mind of other food-related euphemisms, which, in the English language, at least, dated back to—

And that’s when Meesh saw it.

The ripple in the fur between the eyes. Caused by the eyes fluttering open. The kick of the front legs, in the split-second before the men sawed them off. What was left of the reindeer thrashed violently in the grass, its keening coming out as a chorus, as if every part of it were singing, all the air leaving its fighting body at once. The men worked to get it under control, one gripping its antlers so hard that when it whipped its head around, the shaft of bone came off in his hand—a nauseating crack—and lifted the deer’s hide up with it.

Its skull, now exposed, was not the mineral moonscape Meesh had expected.

Not barren at all, but growing.

A tropical island. A teeming hothouse. A sheet of fuzzy yellow.

The reindeer’s belly, finally still: marbled cherry candy in the sun.

The surrogate had been lovely. That wasn’t the problem.

Going in, Meesh had this vision of surrogacy, cobbled together from dystopian literature and Lifetime movie trailers. Young girl, poor girl, wearing the same ratty Ramones tee to every appointment. Forced into it by capital-C Circumstances. Stoic, hardened. Only the shadow of a wince for the icy speculum.

How Meesh might’ve ended up, had she not gotten together with Scott.

Gen was in her mid-thirties, a former Division I basketball star who still played on the weekends, had this permanent flush to her like she’d just stepped off the court. She wasn’t in it for the money, though of course—little laugh—she’d be crazy not to take it. Her thing was, honestly? She just loved being pregnant. She was one of the lucky ones who carried easily. Slept even better. Stayed lean in the limb.

She’d had two of her own, and now that her family was complete, she missed it. Meesh had never understood what people meant when they said their family was complete. How did they know? How could a person be so sure that every last void in their life was filled? For Meesh, they were opening up all the time.

Gen had, as Scott’s cheeseball dad would’ve said, more charm than a box of marshmallow breakfast cereal. She told Meesh they were family now, pulled her in for tight hugs that, as time went on, made Meesh increasingly nervous. Meesh would suck in her own stomach to avoid crushing Gen’s, the contents of which were Meesh’s property anyway. Or soon to be.

More charm than breakfast cereal. More allure than the magazine aisle. Gen didn’t get offended when the nurses called hers a geriatric pregnancy, just did her old-person lost-my-glasses-again gag and felt around for an invisible cane. Everyone got a huge kick out of it. And Gen was so appropriate around Scott, seemed to experience him not so much as a man as an extension of Meesh. Like a purse that was perfectly nice, you could certainly understand why it was in the room. But you wouldn’t, for example, address it directly.

Gen was wholly devoted to her own husband: Rahul, school superintendent, heaven in an argyle vest. Had encouraged Gen to pursue surrogacy. That supportive.

Meesh couldn’t hate Gen. Actually, she kind of loved her. At one point during the second trimester, she started having these under-the-bleachers dreams about Gen that would cause her to wake up turned away from Scott, a charge of dynamite between her legs.

The problem wasn’t that Meesh minded the surrogate. The problem was that Meesh didn’t mind the blood.

At the hospital, yes, when the afterbirth arrived like some del Toro sea creature and Scott went pale because he was sure this meant Gen was dying— no way could a person expel entire organs and survive—and now Rahul, salt- of-the-earth Rahul, would be left to care for the kids on his own, meaning he’d have no choice but to quit superintendenting, and so many students would be the worse for it, and Rahul would be the worse for it, growing more resentful by the year, and Meesh knew firsthand, didn’t she, the damage resentful single fathers could do.

Scott could really get himself going. Worrying the afterbirth would be the thing that killed Gen instead of the thing that a certain subset, no lie, liked to preserve and use to make Christmas cookies.

Meanwhile, Meesh couldn’t tear her eyes away.

But before the hospital as well. Long before. Meesh’s aunt, when she was still alive, had this story about Meesh. About how, when Meesh first got her period, she free-bled—for, who knew how long, months?—until her aunt finally pulled Meesh aside and told her about pads, the kind that would mask the bad (but natural!) smell with a mélange of equatorial flowers. That was the trouble with not having a woman in the house, her aunt would say, then glare accusingly at Meesh’s father. As if he had somehow made Meesh’s mom die, plugged into that drunk driver’s Google Maps—before Google Maps was even a thing, by the way. That’s right: Meesh’s dad had invented Google Maps, then directed that drunk driver to the exact coordinates of that poorly lit intersection himself.

As if dying was the same as leaving.

The day the dead reindeer came back? It didn’t frighten Meesh. It thrilled her. To see the blood swirling again behind the animal’s thinned-milk eyes. It reminded her of that long night at the hospital, when the placenta had shifted in the metal bowl where the doctor had left it and Meesh had briefly mistaken that for the baby, and the baby, already swaddled in a yellow fleece blanket, making bubbly fish lips, as the revolting remains.

And yet, what had they brought home?

Emmanuel surprised Meesh by being the kindest. About the discrepancies between what they had seen.

The group was in the dining room, Ivan at one end of the table and Oks at the other, parents of these ten adult children, most of whom were older than them. The stench of their collective morning breath was the only confirmation that it was, in fact, morning. Rain slapped against the windows and what little light came in was so lean, it registered as darkness.

“Rained out,” Francis moaned into his mug. “On spectacled guillemot day.”

It was also bird’s-eye-view-of-the-lava-fields day. Also surfing-lessons-at- the-black-sand-beach day. But the clouds rolled in low and angry, so Ivan’d had to make the call. Rebecca was engrossed in her notebook. The angler wife was grumbling to her angler husband that this was exactly how vacation scams started: first they make you think you’re getting your money’s worth, then it’s one cancellation after another until the trip peters off to nothing. In front of each person was a cluster of consolation crab legs, twice the width of the plate. Their arrangement, sharp and knuckly, made it impossible to forget they were related to scorpions. Every now and then, someone would pick one up, then set it back down, intact.

“When I was out there,” Emmanuel said, hitting out there like a veteran of a long-fought war, “I would see things sometimes, too. The wilderness, it just, you know. Takes over.” He put a tanned hand on Meesh’s shoulder and gave a squeeze. One of the alpinists looked like she might stab Meesh with the business end of her wild-caught crab.

To be clear, the reindeer had moved. On that point, everyone could agree. Only where Meesh had seen the beginnings of a dramatic, round-twelve comeback, everyone else had seen nothing more than a slight muscle twinge.

“From the amanita muscaria, I’d venture,” Paul said. When Meesh’s look said bless you? he tried again: “The mushrooms. The deer likely ingested a large number, then fell asleep. The spasm could have been the animal momentarily regaining consciousness before—” He paused. “Before losing it again.”

Meesh shook her head, hoping it would make things land the right way up. “You’re not getting it.”

“Amanita muscaria is,” Paul said gently, expression pinched, “among other things, an analgesic. The animal probably felt a great deal less pain than it would have otherwise.”

Suddenly, a shriek pierced the room, and Meesh remembered the crabs still in the kitchen, bobbing in the boiling pots. The steam hissing out of their shells as they dropped their claws from their bodies, one by one. A sacrifice. A final, desperate attempt to escape obliteration.

She imagined going back there and rescuing them. Her skin melting into their shells in the water, and their shells into her skin, until they were both a little of the other. Blistering. Softly chitinous. Bursting free from whatever held them in.

She imagined it. Imagined it. Then stopped.

When she looked down at the table, she found her crab dissected and picked through, though she couldn’t recall taking a bite. What meat remained was pocked with tiny craters the size of milk teeth. The shell fragments formed a heap of broken glass—a shattered windshield washed red.

She dug in till she felt it in the webbing of her fingers.

By the time the storm over their part of Kamchatka cleared, Meesh had been away from him longer than she’d been with him. That had to count for something. Time math. Everybody was always doing time math. Why not her, too?

She had told them. She had said, with absolute blazing certainty, that there wasn’t a single nurturing bone in her body. Take, for example, the grasshopper. The one she’d found and captured in the yard as a kid. Didn’t give a passing thought to food or a name or water, just put him (or her—who could tell with grasshoppers?) in the teeny trap she’d made in woodshop, then up on the shelf among her lesser Beanie Babies, until one day, a few weeks later, her dad had come in, peered through the trap’s tight mesh walls, and said to her, Hey, uh, kiddo. First time he’d ever called her that. Sounded so stupid. Probably something he’d seen in a movie about good dads, decided to try out.

About the lack of nurturing bones in her body, Scott’s family had assured her: Don’t worry, you’ll grow them. And Scott wanted a baby so badly, was sure to be one of the good dads on whom those movies were based. A meet-you-in- the-middle guy, willing to get a surrogate and everything—Meesh hadn’t even needed to concoct some lie about infertility, only had to remind him that there was a reason pregnancy was its own horror . Plus, Scott’s family had added, they were all set in terms of money. And car-seat technology, whew. If for no other reason, you really just had to see what they were doing in the realm of car seats these days. Incredible. Basically little Ferraris. Nothing like when she and Scott were just born.

You could actually be responsible parents with car seats like that. And about the time math, it was, really. Time.

Meesh loved Scott. Loved things about him. His sincere belief that hard work could get you anywhere, even a winter-over at the South Pole. His generosity. His head a wide-stretching, bright, cloudless sky. Though she wasn’t wild about the marriage thing, if she was being honest. Receptionists assuming she was Mrs. Scott’s-Last-Name, though she had clung doggedly to her own. Being introduced at parties as “my wife.” Not that Scott ever did the Borat voice. Thought it disrespectful. It all made Meesh feel like a sub bullet point under Scott’s main bullet. Him, a portrait on the family tree; her, a faint scribble on an adjoining line.

Still, when it was just the two of them, it was okay. Enough.

Afterward, though. The sheer number of Y chromosomes in the house, in those eight healthy pounds. They meant to suffocate her. To strip her clean of her name and call her only Mother.

It was normally the husband who bailed, wasn’t it? Even the bears at Kurile Lake, the second day of the tour: it’d been the mom watching patiently as her baby flunked out of Salmon Catching 101. Once the male was finished mating, he didn’t have anything more to do with the female, or with any cubs said mating might produce.

Meesh’s was a more admirable refusal. Like the reindeer who, in its death throes—about to become blankets, coats, shoes, meat, medicinal powder—insisted, for that moment, it belonged to no one. It would make no one’s name a possessive noun. Its hide would keep only a single being warm.

That pelt, so peculiar. Like the kupalki.

Scott would be fine. He was, speaking of that lake scene, what everyone called a real catch. High-paying job, happy childhood, an eye shape that naturally gave him the look of an attentive listener. He wouldn’t turn out like her dad, who’d kind of just zoned out after her mom was gone, as if in a decades-long state of hibernation. Scott would clean up on the apps, once free to find someone better suited to his lifestyle. Free to date some docile, easy girl whose only hang-up was that she secretly disliked the word “moist.”

Now the storm had lifted. It was finally time. Everyone tumbled blearily out of their cots, pressing their faces against the windows like houseplants kept too long in an airless moving truck. The sky returned to its normal hue: a gauzy shade of white gray that dreamed of being, when it grew up, recognizable as blue.

To bring them to the Dead Forest on the day of their release from captivity was not, Meesh thought, a well-calculated choice. But the ride was short, and Ivan worried that the weather might again turn.

What they craved was butterflies. Fields of waving, never-once-cut grasses. Whales leaping from the water—two whales, ideally, leaping in opposite directions, so they could meet in the middle to form an arc of resilience and triumph, backdrop a Lisa Frank neon sunset, and give each other a slippery high-five.

A spectacled guillemot, begged Francis. Or at the very least, a red-necked grebe.

Birds, yeah, everyone agreed. Anything symbolic of freedom.

What they got instead was thirty miles of cadaverous trees, all a strange, dull non-color: a wasteland created when a nearby volcano erupted decades ago. The trees jutted straight up from steaming thermal pools, not a single interesting bend to any one of them. Every so often, a young shrub tried to worm its way out from beneath layers of ash and slag.

“Kamchatka is a land of such extremes,” Ivan was saying, “that scientists from around the world study it to learn about life on other planets.” He patted one of the optimistic shrubs. “Here, scientists investigate how life might recover from periods of intense environmental stress.”

Oks clapped twice, drawing an underline below what he’d just said. This was the tour’s big aha, the revelation meant to instill some small hope about the fate of their particular planet. The pleasant thought that it might simply repair itself using the healing properties of Kamchatka’s mineral-rich waters, et cetera. The angling couple nodded reverently. This, too, was a kind of freedom. Behind Meesh, a giant whip cracked. She jumped—out of the way of the falling tree or directly into its path, she had no idea, but it was good to keep moving. Ridiculous to receive a sign from the universe loud as that and do nothing. Only, no one else so much as turned their heads. And not so much as a branch fell. What was odd about the trees was not that they weren’t vertical—they were, Meesh checked, once she’d regained her bearings—but that their bark had been removed. Most of it, anyway. The whole way around the trunk, from the roots up. Flayed, like the tree was in the process of peeling off a surgical glove.

Underneath, where there should have been—what? Some secondary stratum of wood? Springier, more spongelike? Meesh wasn’t an extreme arborist, wasn’t an arborist at all. Underneath was not any of that, but a mat of bacterial yellow, shifting in the thin daylight. One second it had the texture of the felt dryer balls Gen used when doing laundry (to spare her kids—good mom alert—exposure to harsh chemicals). The next second the yellow was a million billion densely packed cilia; or as many sulfuric crystals, low and delicate enough to resemble moss.

Oks had said that kupalki couldn’t stray far from the water. But it sure seemed to Meesh they’d figured out land.

That was the issue with people. There was so much they couldn’t answer to Meesh’s satisfaction. Even Oks—while hot and capable, while good-smelling, like smoke and honey, and more outspoken than Ivan—was still beholden to the Kamchatka Beasts and Bubblers tour company and whatever intricate local systems had been put in place to make possible such a dubious affair as carting a bunch of foreigners through one of the most secluded territories of an already isolated country. And Oks, once Ivan had cast his objections, had relented.

The kupalki, on the other hand, never ceased their shrill ruckus. Hiss like a whistle, scream like a song. If anything, they’d gotten louder. And there was so much more Meesh wanted to know: how deep they swam to sleep, to mate. If they slept or mated at all. Which crevices made good homes, so they wouldn’t be forced upward, in defenseless, undignified shapes, each time the geysers blew. Most of all: the hoofprints she’d seen. Winding through the white sinter, which, though it looked innocent as sidewalk chalk, was hot enough to melt feet to shoes. Why had that hooved thing come? Why had it run?

Not why, rather. Meesh knew why. But what moment of pleasure? What moment of terror? She wanted all the gory details, please.

Dying was not the same as leaving. It was, as they say, a whole different animal.

As Meesh stepped off the marked path, the image she held in her mind was one totally incongruous with the hostility of Kamchatka: a tranquil Cleopatra soaking in her grand milk bath, knees twin tower islands. All around, braying wetly through the steam, was her famous herd of lactating donkeys. Hundreds of them, arranged ceremoniously around the tub according to some spa attendant and/or set designer’s artistic vision: the tub the sun, the donkeys the rays. Alternatively: the queen the sun, the tub the rays, the donkeys the . . . belt of conspicuously toothy asteroids?

In any case.

Cleopatra hummed a little earworm, whatever was getting too much air-time on the radio those days. One of the donkeys soiled its lamé robe, then hee-hawed in protest of the mortifying, albeit necessary, processes of the physical, earthbound body. A fly bit. A welt rose.

At last, all was quiet.