When Nan and her mother Dana arrived, the cabin smelled of garbage and animal urine and heat and the dead man’s body. The man was on the floor, bloated and stinking under a heavy blanket: beside him, an empty bottle of pills. Scrapes across his cheeks, claw marks at his throat.
“Another peaceful death,” Dana said.
She had begun, at times, to say the opposite of what was true. This made conversation with her confusing.
Almost nineteen, Nan actually had two mothers. Her mother Lindsay had been uninterested in living through the extinction of the human species, so she’d hung herself in their backyard in Syracuse, New York, using a simple noose made from Nan’s childhood rope swing.
