The woman in the house across the street decides to leave. A man walks out of a bar and disappears. In California, half a million people all look up at the sky, and find that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

On the shoulder of a highway two brothers kiss in the back of a car while their father sleeps in the front seat. Another man in another car, going forty miles an hour in a one hundred-mile zone, shakes his head at something said on the radio. A house in the middle of nowhere, recently foreclosed: the wallpaper in the living room slowly peels away.

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me a Devi saved her life during a four-story suicide leap the year China went Red. Me on her lap, she told how she toed the building ledge, staring out over the network of alleyways smothered in smoke and screams.

Phoebe, having finished her stockings, started on her husband’s shirts and then, with Rose, tackled the vegetable garden while Rose told her stories about her brother’s exploits at Salamanca, which sounded like a lark, at least in her telling. Phoebe held the wholly unfounded belief that she might have made a good soldier, which she voiced as she pulled a doll-sized radish out of the earth and shook it firmly. Laughing, Rose shielded herself from the spray of dirt.

Marina woke to hushed conversations from the kitchen. Three voices, including Lee's, all low and serious.

Marina and Lee had lived apart now for six months, she and the girls here in Irving, Lee renting an apartment twenty minutes away in Dallas. He said he had good work there, though never offered specifics. Only on weekends did he stay with them. At first, the arrangement embarrassed her; they'd been married just two years. But she quickly came to appreciate the space it gave her from his increasingly frequent rants and demands.

The people of the siege jumped for joy, even though this happiness only endured for a night.