says. “I didn’t make them that way. If they’re unhappy, it’s their own fault. They should have listened to me.”
“God. You can’t admit it,” says Mona. “You can’t admit that… Jesus, that everything you’ve done has been a mistake. That’s why you can’t leave them alone, can you? If you did, it’d mean you were wrong.”
Mona’s mother does not answer.
“You can’t find happiness this way, Momma,” says Mona. “You can’t. You can’t just set it up and move in.”
“No one ever finds happiness,” snarls Mona’s mother, suddenly bitter. She takes a little breath. Then, serene once more, “No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That’s all I want—just to get close.”
“No,” says Mona. “There is happiness. Real happiness.”
“That’s a lie.”
“No. It’s true.”
“And what do you know about it?”
Mona looks down at her hands. She suddenly remembers dark hotel rooms, the neon lights of bars, the dull yellow strobe of passing highway stripes; she remembers her father, eyes flat, face averted, as he tore the skin from the shank of a doe, blood pooling on the driveway; and she remembers a tiny black casket, unadorned and shining in the sunlight, fading from view as it descended into a small, careful cubbyhole carved into the earth. “I know… I know what it’s like not to have it,” she whispers. But then she remembers the child she just held in her arms, tiny and squashed and luminous and perfect, and how looking at her made her feel that she’d never want anything again in the world. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know, Momma. Sometimes you find something that makes you feel like you could have nothing or everything and it wouldn’t matter to you at all. Nothing in the world could be better than that thing. And you’ve never had that.”
Her mother is silent for a long, long time. Then she takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter,” she says again, slowly. “I’ll do it anyway. I’ll still try again.”
“Why can’t you just leave us all alone?”
“Because that moment,” says her mother, “that moment of pure, perfect anticipation… that is such a good feeling. You don’t know what I would do to get that feeling again, my love. I have been alive for so long… I have seen so many things… I had children just because I’d never had any before. It was just something new to do. That newness is… indescribable. Even if it only lasts for a little while. But there are so many new places in this plane of reality. I can come close to that happiness again, and again, and again… it will be like heaven, for me. For a little while.” She grows terribly still, dark eyes shining. “Now tell me. Tell me what you’re doing with the child. Tell me what is up there on the mountain.”
Mona swallows. She hopes she can do this.
“I’ll tell you,” she says softly. She shuts her eyes again. “As a matter of fact, I’ll show you.”
Mona sets her arms at her hips, miming holding something: perhaps something long and thin, like a rifle. Then, slowly, she pretends to lift the invisible thing and hold it to her shoulder.
Parson squints through the smoke and the dust at Mona. Were he looking normally, he wouldn’t be able to see anything—but as he himself has said before, there are other ways of seeing than through mere radiation.
She moves. Just a bit—then more. For so long she was still, but now, even though her eyes are closed, she is lifting the rifle to her shoulder and appears to be aiming.
“Hm,” says Parson.
“Watch, Momma,” says Mona.
“What?” asks her mother. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a trick I learned. Watch.”
Then she sets her cheek along the invisible barrel, takes a slight breath, and says:
Boom.
Boom.
The round flies through the giant’s legs, zipping through the tiny gap between its knees and hurtling toward the park.
It whines through the three tall pines that stand in a row beside the courthouse, narrowly dodging several branches.
It slashes through a single pinecone, turning it to fluttering shrapnel.
Then it falls, falls, falls…
And punches a hole in the side of the fat white geodesic dome.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then something moves inside the dome. Something long, and dark, and ancient.
And one large, furious eye appears in the hole in the dome, staring out.
When the storm first came, everyone knew the dome had been struck by lightning. But, the dome being the dome, no damage was done.