This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2024 by Ivy Pochoda

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662517082 (digital)

Cover design by David Litman

Cover image: © Luís Henrique Boucault, © sakchai vongsasiripat, © PetlinDmitry / Getty Images

Thanks to Jeremy Swan for the ink and wisdom

Swan rolls down the car window, sticks out her arm, driving like her dad used to when she was little. Trucker tan. Farmer tan. Whatever you call it.

Back then, air-conditioning in a car felt like a luxury. More often, the fresh air beat the canned air regardless of the temperature. Cold. Hot. Didn’t matter.

The Subaru’s cooling system conked out five months ago when it was unseasonably and unreasonably wet and cold for Los Angeles. Rain and floods. Even snow. And something they called an atmospheric river. Weeks of rain. Weeks and weeks.

There was time enough to fix the car before the weather cleared and warmed. So Swan had thought.

Back then—just five months but also a lifetime—she and Paul were still married, still a two-income household, still coasting on the financial ease of not worrying about what they spent, how they spent it, and what would happen next. Now she’s alone. Not broke, but close. She should have fixed the car when she still had a husband to shoulder the cost.

The California 62—the Twentynine Palms Highway—flattens as it finishes the climb from Desert Hot Springs into Morongo Valley. Once the car is over the pass and in the high desert, the sun begins its assault. Swan can feel it singeing the hairs on her arm.

She glances at the digital display on the dash. Ninety-eight.

Early spring in the desert can cook you quick.

If she were talking to one of her clients, she’d advise pulling her arm back in the car, protect the new ink from the raging sun. Protect the lines and the color.

Swan’s moving to the desert semipermanently, so protecting her ink is a lost cause. The sun will have its way, and there’s not much she can do about it.

Her eyes linger on her forearm a beat longer than safe on the winding road. Two recent additions. A tarot card—La Dama Fortuna—on the underside, below her elbow, and a hummingbird flying from her wrist to her hand.

They’ll fade.

Everything fades.

Fades but lingers. Like Paul. He was there, present in the house. But also not.

Swan had done the tarot card and hummingbird herself—the first ink she’d applied to her own skin since her early days of tattooing. Strange to feel the fine bones of her wrist under the needle. Out of body almost. Victim and prey. Sometimes the pieces reveal the truth we hide from ourselves.

She never tires of looking at ink on her skin.

That experience is also out of body. The ink makes her feel more permanent. More indelible. But also as if she’s looking at someone who isn’t her.

She passes through Yucca. Hip and hipper. Design shops. Organic cafés. Curated vintage boutiques.

Between these—strip malls, like anywhere. Smoke shops. Thai takeout. Massage parlors. Tattoo and piercing places. Swan tries not to judge. You can find artists anywhere. But still. Probably clip art you choose from a binder or pick off the wall. Everyone with a version of the same heart, the same rose. The same, same, same.

The real desert is to the south, behind the business strip, getting wilder as it runs toward the national park.

Then Joshua Tree. #nofilter.

Sharper and higher contrast than on Instagram. Less pink and pale yellow. More blue and brown. Tangible. Hard-edged. Not diffuse and gauzy as social media shows it. A place, not a lifestyle.

Swan knows that beyond the highway are the Airbnbs she’s seen in fashion spreads and on Instagram—architectural desert compounds with hot tubs, pools, cold plunges, and spas reckless of the constant drought conditions. Homestead cabins for the luxe homesteaders with chef kitchens or even private chefs. Firepits and remote-controlled fireplaces. Floor-to-ceiling windows that keep the desert distant and palatable.

From the highway she sees a saloon, a farmers’ market, a wine shop, a line for coffee and pastries. The entrance to the national park. A traffic jam snaking back to the highway. Art galleries and more thrift shops.

Seventeen miles to Twentynine Palms. Then another twenty to Miracle Wash.

Out of town: a chain hotel, a Dollar General, a Del Taco.

Twentynine Palms. Less gentrified. But still a few signs that the writing is on the wall for the smutty massage parlors and mom-and-pop Mexican and BBQ joints. A boutique selling desert style to people just passing through, an organic bakery, a bistro coming soon. All of these between more tattoo shops with dark, smudged windows. Sand turned into dirt. Not the assurance of sterility that Swan requires. How long before she’s working at places like these, inking other people’s art on the burly forearms of marines from the base?

Always work near a base. Always a marine or his girl (or her guy) who wants something commemorated. That’s what Robbie and Karine told her when they offered her their shipping container out in Miracle Wash after it was clear that Paul would keep the house because it was his before they met. Robbie and Karine bought their jackrabbit homestead—a tiny cabin on a five-acre tract—a decade back but never got around to fixing it up. The container was a stopgap made permanent until they relocated from Minneapolis and finally, finally started their renovation, picking up where the former owners had left off.

Free of charge, they told her.

Don’t like the place sitting empty.

A couple of fires in the last few years.

Nothing to worry about. Not really.

The next-door neighbor’s place burned. Tragic. Well, not exactly next door but as next door as you can be in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes someone on the prowl.

Vagrants.

Occasional gunfire. But don’t worry.

Better to keep it occupied.

Don’t want squatters.

Their descriptions made their place seem less than safe. But what choice did Swan have?

And at the end of the day the desert was the new hip frontier:

#wanderlust

#desertvibes

#backtonature

#soundbath

#moonbath

#stargazing

The landscape rolls on, just desolate enough. Swan takes out her phone.

Click.

#desertescape

The Circle K, last gas for a hundred miles. Last convenience store too. Pickups and a white park ranger vehicle. The ranger is outside. A woman. Small but armed like the yuccas could riot.

Then the airport where the runway lights are remote-controlled by arriving pilots. Swan read about that in a Michael Connelly novel.

Dirt roads to the left.

Nothing to the right.

Nothing in general, unless you know what you’re looking for.

Swan checks her odometer, measuring the mileage until the dirt turnoff Karine told her she was almost sure to miss. Then another mile. Another turnoff, to the right this time.

The jackrabbit homestead is the same pale, gray-wash shade as the distant mountains—a trompe l’oeil illusion. If not for the splintered wood window frames, she might have looked right through it.

Nothing like houses she sees on her ’gram—the eco-modern ranches and groovy domed compounds. Nothing hip or gracious, relaxing or soothing. Nothing transcendental.

This is straight-up desert—harsh, bare, brutal.

#roughingit

Swan passed similar cabins on the way—small homesteads in various states of neglect and repair. Some fancified and fenced in, others falling away into the desert, more shell than house. Karine and Robbie’s container is somewhere between—a half-complete renovation abandoned about a decade ago. The ghost of a kitchen never built. A half-framed wall dividing the main room.

She finds the lockbox where the key to the container is hidden. She glances over her shoulder as if the place might be watching her, then inputs Karine’s dog’s birthday.

The shadows out in the desert are different. Starker. As if they have an existence independent of the objects that cast them. They move. They watch with an intensity that unsettles Swan. They spider between the chaparral and creosote.

She looks at the key in her hand, lying at the base of a serpent tattoo that Sandro wrapped around her forearm and wrist two decades ago. The snake’s head ends at the base of her palm, its eyes upward facing. She closes her fingers tight over the key, making the creature’s eyes bulge.

Someone is watching her. Eyes she can feel if not see.

She stares at the tattoo. Another reason for all the ink—it means she’s never alone.

The container is clean and neat, if a little sterile. Concrete slab floor. Cold, cut-rate Scandi furniture. Bar cart. Every noise an echo. One window that looks in the opposite direction from the main house.

Swan moves the curtain. More desert. More sandy roads. Pale mountains in the distance.

But in the foreground, more jackrabbit homesteads. The closest is burned down to the studs. A husk, not a house. The surrounding sand is charred, a black, ashy nimbus that circles the remains of the structure. To the left—a trailer. Mideighties Tioga but grounded on blocks.

A curtain in the trailer drops. A shadow pulls back.

Careful what you wish for. Because who knows who’s watching in this lonely place.

Swan steps away from the window. She runs her fingers along the snake tattoo, letting it reassure her. Then she holds up her arm, the snake facing inward—behind it the desert, the burned house, and the distant mountains in the background.

#whoswatchingthewatcher

The only bar—drive down Amboy Road, and when you think you’ve gone too far, you’ll find it, Karine said—is mostly locals only.

They can be nice after a while. And then only maybe, Robbie added.

It’s a roadhouse with a room in the back with a small stage. Behind it, a larger outdoor space for concerts. It’s dark and dusty and looks to have been cobbled together from the remains of other bars. The food is a cut above. Traditional grub but made with care.

No sign of the self-realization vision-questing of Joshua Tree. No ads for reiki or yoga or ayahuasca experiences. Only a sign that reads STOP MIRACLES tacked to the door. In her few days out here, Swan’s learned the desert sends mixed signals.

Three nights running and no one has said a word to Swan, just given her and her sketchbook wide berth. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that you either came up in this desert or you paid your dues.

Three nights running, she drinks Coronas and a single Jameson. Dinner is fried—zucchini, mozzarella sticks, mushrooms. Doesn’t really matter.

Her drawing spills across the page. A Joshua tree with a roadrunner in the foreground. She knows how each line will feel as she inks it on someone’s arm—the tree’s branches will be in fits and starts. The sweep of the limbs, easy. But each bayonet-shaped leaf will need to be rendered with precision; otherwise the green spikes of the yucca will look like an indistinct halo, a pom-pom instead of a crown of thorns.

This is assuming anyone will want this piece at all.

Swan glances around the bar. She can see faded ink on many of the locals. Hard to make out what’s what in the light. She can pick out some military tattoos. Several testimonials to mothers or lovers. But nothing like what she’s drawn. These people don’t want to memorialize, sensationalize, or idolize their landscape.

Her tattoo is for tourists. Click.

#desertfail

Four nights in, and Swan has learned the desert’s night noises—the grunt and snuffle and scratch that surround the container when she tries to sleep.

The house she shared with Paul in LA was up in the hills, elevated on posts and stilts—the ground at a remove—the city winking in the distance. Here she feels part of the desert, the container’s walls a thin barrier between her and the night.

There are eyes that glow in the dark. A free fall in her stomach when she allows herself to confront the black expanse that stretches south, east, and west of the container. So much nothing, yet a sense that she’s not alone.

It’s what you wanted, she tells herself.

It’s the only choice you had, comes the reply.

But tonight the noises are different.

Someone is outside the window. Not right outside but close. Swan wakes to the crunch of footsteps. Behind the thin curtain the moon is obscenely bright.

There’s a man in the burned-out house, a shadow patrolling the charred remains. He paces back and forth, now and then kicking debris from his path.

Then he stops, aware of someone watching. He looks through the space where a window once was. He reaches down. There’s a crash as something hits the window of the shipping container.

Swan dives back into bed. The sun comes up before she sleeps.

The bartender’s name is Peter, and he’s from New York but has been out in the desert for twenty-five years. He runs the open mic night and a local art show in the bar’s back room. Sometimes he wears a Stop Miracles hat, like the sign on the door to the bar.

“Local pride,” he says when Swan asks him about it.

Swan’s been doing her best to keep the conversation going with him, but Peter parks himself at the far end in front of a burly man in a red baseball cap—faded pinup tattoo on his bicep, something tribal (Celtic maybe) on his opposite arm. She watches them as she draws. This evening’s sketch is quasireligious—a cross that’s really a dagger between two storm clouds. She tries to let the desert guide her hand.

Swan believes tattoo art should be just that—tattoo art. She doesn’t have time for abstraction or hyperrealism. She can’t stand the current fad for mini tattoos scribble-scrabbled here and there—dots, lines, some cursive words. It’s a bold art form.

Go big or go home, Sandro told her the first time she wandered into his shop in Providence to get a daisy chain on her wrist. You want your body to tell a story, not drop hints. After two sessions, he finished the serpent tattoo.

A month later, Swan had dropped out of art college and become Sandro’s apprentice.

She shades the sky, turns the clouds blue because gray on skin is a drag. White is better but doesn’t show up as well. Paul was an artist—a real artist, he insisted, though not in those words. He taught painting at Cal Arts and had small shows around town. She should do more with her art, he insisted. She should do real art. He always told her what to do but never listened to her reply.

Swan watches as the man in the baseball cap chugs the last of his beer. He pushes back from the bar. But instead of heading for the exit, he swings round to her side.

Up close she can see how faded and blurred his ink is. It’s hard to tell what the tribal piece was, if it was anything at all.

“The fuck are you looking at,” he says.

“Nothing.”

“That’s a lie. You’re looking, always looking. I’ve seen you looking. You mind your own business. That’s what I’m here to tell you. Mind your own fucking business.” His eyes linger on her serpent tattoo. It looks as if he’s going to say more. But he leaves without another word.

Swan’s hand is shaking as she lifts the dregs of her Corona.

Peter is back in front of her with a fresh one. “On the house. That’s your neighbor, Kurt.”

“How do you know where I live?”

The question isn’t worth a response.

“Kurt’s okay,” Peter says.

“He lives in the burned-out house?” Swan asks.

“He did when it wasn’t burned.” He glances at the tarot card tattoo. “Fortuna?”

Swan runs her hands over the tarot. “You have to make your own luck.”

“Who did it?” Peter asks, as if the name of every tattoo artist in the world could mean something to him.

“I did.”

He looks at her drawing. “Who’s that for?”

“You if you want it.” She tears it out of her sketchbook and writes her IG handle on the bottom. “Let me know if you want to make it permanent.”

Over the weekend, Peter puts out the call for an open mic night in the bar’s back room. A surprising number of acts. A punk band made up of five women. A fiddler and an accordionist duo. A geriatric rhinestone cowboy and his childlike sidekick in kitty-cat ears. It’s amazing to Swan that these people are hidden away in this community. She rarely sees cars on the roads. Never encounters people in their yards. But here they are.

At the end of the night, a collection goes round in a large plastic container shaped like a barrel. There’s a photo taped to the front, worn and crackled. Swan fishes in her wallet. As a newcomer she can’t not give, but she can’t give too much.

She doesn’t ask what it’s for.

But later at the bar she orders another drink. The collection is now next to the taps. Swan takes a seat on a stool to get a better look at the crinkled photo behind the tape. It’s Kurt, her neighbor. He’s several years younger and is standing in front of the burned-out house, except it’s not burned. It’s painted pale yellow. There are Christmas lights framing the window. A woman is standing next to him. Long brown hair. Wearing a sundress and large cat-eye glasses. Not exactly desert tough. Kurt has his arm around her waist.

Funeral Costs for Melanie Radler

Judging by the state of the container and the state of the burned-out house, the funeral has long since come and gone.

A woman’s hand grasps the lip of the jar. “Community business,” she says. She’s got lank brown hair in a drooping bob. She wears a faded T-shirt from the marine base. “You give or you leave, but you don’t stare.”

Swan opens her mouth to explain she’s already donated. But one look in the woman’s red-rimmed eyes and hardened face shuts her up quick. She drops in another five.

“What happened—” she asks.

“What happened is a tragedy,” the woman says. “Not everything that happens in Miracle Wash is a miracle. And not everything is your business.”

Swan is always surprised how well the internet works in the container. She finds the story in the Hi-Desert Star and the Victorville Press from three years back. Miracle Wash Woman Dead in Fire.

Kurt had been away. His wife had not.

Electrical fire.

Tragedy.

Aspiring designer. Longtime Miracle resident.

Community mourns.

That night the wind shakes the container. The building feels as if it will blow over. A hailstorm of rocks and gravel pounds the sides. The metal walls wail. It sounds to Swan like the cries of a burning child.

She goes to the window and looks at the charred house. The moon is a sliver, not enough light to see by. She can only make out the building’s silhouette. But she senses Kurt in there standing up to the storm.

The bar opens for breakfast on Sundays. Eggs. Pancakes. Tacos. The collection jar is still on the counter.

Swan orders eggs and tortillas, extra salsa, and a Bloody Mary that comes from a jar, but that’s just fine. She has her sketchbook and fine-tipped pens. But instead of drawing on paper, she draws on the back of her hand. One drink in and the doodle takes shape—a wave breaking across her wrist.

The door to the bar opens.

“How come you’re always here?” She doesn’t have to look up to know who’s talking.

“I have a lot of free time.”

“Go spend it somewhere else.”

Kurt comes to the bar and tips the collection container. He catches Swan’s eye. “So now you know my story. Happy?”

“I could tattoo her for you. Well, not her. But a tribute.”

His eyes climb from the wave up her arm. “You do all those?”

“Some of them.”

Kurt walks away without another word.

Swan hadn’t figured on breakfast being so busy, but by eleven the bar is packed.

A few of the patrons are wearing Stop Miracles shirts.

Kurt seems to be at the center of the crowd—a head taller, a decibel louder—like his grief has supersized him. The Miracle Wash residents surround him, someone always with a hand on his shoulder, his forearm, sliding him a new drink.

Swan doodles as she watches. The drawing takes shape unbidden, a man standing with his arm around a woman. They are in silhouette, a neon sunrise behind them. She knows who they are and she knows she has no right, but she cannot stop herself.

“You know the tourist?” The same woman who’d coerced another donation from Swan last night is looking her way, her voice deliberately loud enough to catch Swan’s ear.

“My new neighbor.” Swan is surprised by Kurt’s reply.

“How new?” the woman asks. “How permanent?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Kurt replies. There’s something savage in his voice that tiptoes down Swan’s spine.

The woman is at Swan’s side. “This is a private event.”

“I thought it was breakfast,” Swan says.

“That’s the problem. Newcomers turn up and always think they know everything.”

“Lucinda.” Peter is down at their end wiping a glass with a gray rag.

“Lucinda nothing,” the woman says. “Up to you, those women from San Francisco would be stealing our water supply so they could raise herbs and crap for their overpriced beauty products. Up to you, this place would be overrun and underserved. We don’t have the resources for strangers.”

“Up to me,” Peter says, “people who pay for their drinks get to drink them.”

“That’s why the community center is up to me and this bar is up to you.” She flips Swan’s sketchbook closed. “Our new friend here wants to settle up.”

Swan fumbles in her pocket and takes out a crumpled ten that won’t cover her bill.

“Leave it,” Peter says. “It’s fine.”

She feels Lucinda’s eyes on her back until the door closes behind her. Halfway home, she realizes she forgot her sketchbook. She turns the wheel, then corrects. It will be there tomorrow or it won’t, but there’s no returning to the bar now.

In the shipping container, Swan flops down on her bed, the whole day in front of her. A whole day like every other day. No plan except to keep waking up in the morning, going to bed at night. She’s getting back on her feet, she’ll tell anyone who asks. But sometimes it’s a challenge just to get out of bed.

She looks at her tattoo kit in the corner. It’s been a month since she inked anyone. The swelling on her index finger from the machine has gone down. But her palms itch, longing for the buzz of the needle as she steadies it on someone’s skin.

All those hipsters to the north in Yucca and J-Tree. Surely someone wants ink. She scrolls, her eyes flickering over the traditional desert imagery offered by upscale desert studios—derivative Georgia O’Keeffe nonsense and nonnative cacti. Nothing that has any bearing on the place outside her window. Or the desert at all really.

Curated stuff.

Easy pieces.

Vibes over reality.

Still, she needs to hammer her socials, let people know she’s local and taking bookings. She opens her phone. Last night’s web search is still open—the story on the deadly fire that killed Kurt’s wife. The date catches Swan’s eyes, three years ago to the day.

Aspiring designer. Of what? Swan wonders. She closes the browser.

Miracle Wash likes to grieve behind closed doors.

The wind starts when the sun falls, spreading menacing shadows across the already inhospitable land. The sky is lavender, then pink, then orange, then black. The wind, once more, sounds like someone screaming.

Then the coyotes begin, yipping and laughing, their cries rising until their kill is complete.

Swan lies on the bed, staring at the sky through the single window. She imagines the feel of the needle driving the ink into her arm—the sensation a distraction from the wailing, from her isolation, from everything.

It takes her a moment to distinguish the knocking on the door from the wind battering the window.

Kurt is outside. He’s holding her sketchbook. “You forgot this.”

“Thanks.”

“You could do it now.”

“Do what?”

“This,” he says, tapping the sketchbook. “It’s me and my wife.”

There’s no point in contradicting him.

“It’s us, so it belongs on me.”

“Where?”

Kurt taps the top of his left shoulder blade. “Let’s go,” he says.

It takes Swan a while to set up. She has to plug in her scanner and scan the drawing, then print it out on the transfer paper so she can position it on Kurt’s shoulder. “You sure about the placement?”

Most people who want tribute or memorial tats place them where they are visible, where they can easily show them off—a bicep or forearm.

“I’m sure.”

“Words? Name?”

“Melanie. That’s all you need to know.”

Swan tells Kurt to sit backwards on the chair, his arms wrapped around the seat back. She presses the transfer into his skin. It takes her two hours to complete the outline. Kurt doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t ask for a break.

“You want to talk about the colors?” Swan asks.

“Just do your thing.”

The colors present themselves quickly—reds, oranges, yellows for the sunset. It’s too late when Swan realizes how closely the palette she’s chosen resembles fire.

It’s dark by the time she is done. She wipes him clean with Noxzema, the sharp scent of the cream erasing the smell of skin and sweat. She snaps a picture on her phone and shows it to Kurt. If he objects to the flaming sky above the silhouette of his deceased wife, he says nothing.

She hears his feet shuffling through the sand and chaparral from her container to his trailer.

That night Swan lies in bed. Her hand aches from the work. She listens to the wind’s persistent howl.

In the morning she finds the bloody remains of two jackrabbits ceremonially arranged in front of the container’s door.

Swan rolls up to the bar in the late afternoon. It’s Saturday, but the parking lot is empty except for one pickup. She’s got one leg out of the car when Peter emerges, locking the bar’s door behind him. He’s holding a grocery bag.

“Memorial Day,” he says, seeing her. “Big holiday around here because of the base.”

“I thought people liked to drink on national holidays.”

“They do. But over at the community center. It’s an annual thing. Supporting the Miracle Wash vets.”

Swan swings back into the driver’s seat.

“You could come,” Peter says.

“I don’t know.”

“Might help, you know, with relations.”

“Is it a private thing?”

“It’s at the community center. So, the opposite.”

Swan follows Peter’s short-bed pickup a little way down Amboy Road.

The community center is a plain yellow building that reminds Swan of a run-down real estate office or low-cost dental practice. It’s rotten-egg yellow. An American flag, a state flag, a Marine Corps flag, and a POW flag flutter in the occasional breeze. A sign behind glass at the entrance notifies residents of upcoming meetings, including one about a recent novel set in Miracle Wash that is drawing unwanted attention to the area.

The door is locked but through the glass Swan can see a multipurpose room lined with bookshelves and a table set up for food distribution.

The gathering is around back in a semishaded yard. The air smells of easy-light charcoal. There’s a tub filled with off-brand beer. Swan recognizes a handful of people from the bar, but there are more who are strangers—older grizzled men, many of them in faded military caps and T-shirts. Two in wheelchairs. One on oxygen.

At the center is Lucinda. Lank hair brushed. POW bandanna around her neck. Gruff and kind with her guests—bringing them plates of hot dogs and burgers—until her eyes land on Swan.

“Is this a private party too?” Swan asks.

“No, this is a celebration of those who served. Glad you turned out. Our vets are essential to the Miracle community.” Then her eyes narrow. “Kurt was at your place last night.”

“No secrets here.”

“Absolutely not.” Lucinda hands a hot dog to a man in a wheelchair. “Not one. And most of us don’t have cell phones. Or Wi-Fi. But still news gets around. You should keep away from Kurt. We take care of our own. As you can see.” She gestures around the gathering. “He’s never been the same since she died. He can’t forgive himself. What’s more, he doesn’t need the comfort of outsiders. The community is helping him through his grief.”

“He can grieve how he wants, I guess,” Swan says.

“No,” Lucinda says. “He grieves like we tell him. Otherwise, things could get out of hand.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, we’ve got it under control. Kurt is our problem. Our friend. Not yours.”

“I can’t help who shows up at my door.”

“You can help by not opening it. You want to talk to Kurt, you can do it at the bar.”

“I can’t tattoo at the bar.”

“That’s what you were doing?”

“I thought there weren’t any secrets in Miracle Wash,” Swan says.

“You don’t know anything about Miracle Wash,” Lucinda replies. “We’re having an important meeting next week. Some fancy-pants East Coast writer with a six-figure degree published a novel about our community. It’s a load of crap. You should come listen—hear what people like you do to people like us. But in the meantime, get yourself a drink and some food. Show these vets your respect.”

Drinking in the sun hits harder than in the bar. After a few beers, Swan’s head is swimming. She listens as Lucinda lists the latest efforts of the community center—a GoFundMe for a disabled marine who needed a new wheelchair, restriction of water rights to the outsiders who wanted to farm herbs and market essential oils to desert voyeurs, an upcoming meeting about illegal shooting and firearms use, and an effort to crack down on both squatters and short-term rentals.

The rhinestone cowboy and his young partner arrive and get out their instruments. They play classic Americana. The vets and Lucinda sing along—gravel voices in the heavy air.

Peter pulls out whiskey and tequila from his grocery bags. As the sun sets, someone begins shooting off fireworks—bottle rockets, then Roman candles, then some larger mortars that sound like bombs. As the sky lights up, Peter passes around warm shots in large plastic cups.

“The desert always wins,” they say as they raise their glasses.

Peter refills everyone’s glass one more time and then again.

“The desert always wins,” they chorus again, glasses aloft to the blue-black sky.

“What does that mean?” Swan says. Three shots and her thoughts have become words.

There’s a man in a marine cap next to her. He turns. “It means it’s killed stronger and better than you.” He jabs a finger into Swan’s sternum.

Her cue to leave.

Her welcome worn.

Swan staggers to her car. She can still feel the pressure from the man’s finger as she fumbles with her car keys.

After three shots on top of three beers, Swan makes a wrong turn heading home. It’s dark and her headlights don’t show much, not that there would be much of anything to see. She can navigate generally by the proximity of one set of mountains and the relative distance of the other. But as for finding Amboy Road or her own turnoff, she’s at a loss.

One sandy road leading to another.

One jackrabbit homestead mistaken for all the rest.

One of this.

One of that.

And then nothing at all. The desert goes black, the few lights turned out.

The booze is making Swan dizzy. The encounter with Lucinda has rattled her. The expanse of black makes her head spin. She pulls over. It’s dark, dark, and darker beyond the windshield except for a little fleck of white illuminated in the distance.

Swan gets out of the car. She uses her phone as a flashlight and stumbles toward the white shape hoping for—

Hoping for she doesn’t know what.

It’s farther away than she thought. But also bigger. A sign. A billboard set against the vast nothing. Her legs are aching as she draws close enough to read it. It takes her a moment to scan the large rectangle with her phone.

EXPECT MIRACLES! is scrolled on the diagonal in a large font reminiscent of vintage tourist postcards. Underneath: LUXURY LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE. 45 SELF-STANDING BUNGALOWS, EACH WITH ITS OWN PRIVATE POOL. CLUBHOUSE. SPA. FINE DINING. EXPERIENCE THE DESERT IN PERFECT EASE AND COMFORT. COMING SOON.

Even in the light of her phone, Swan can see the sign is faded and peeling.

Nothing coming soon.

The walk has turned her legs to jelly. The warm desert night is draining her strength, further dehydrating her already drink-dried body. Swan’s head spins fast.

She looks down at her phone. The battery is draining, ready to die.

She scans the dark for her car. It’s lost, back the way she came. And back the way she came is lost too.

Her phone fades to black. And she is alone in the desert.

Ten steps in one direction. Then back to the billboard. She knows the general location of the car. But it’s far, and the pitch black makes it seem unfathomable. Better to wait. Better to rest. Better to shelter in place. Better to stay put and wait for the too-early rise of the sun to show her the way. She leans up against one of the billboard’s splintering posts, hoping that the sign will offer some shade from the sun should she oversleep.

Swan wakes in her own bed. She’s dressed. There’s grit and sand on her lips. But that’s not what wakes her. She wakes because in the last gasp of her dream-state she had become aware that she was not alone.

Kurt sits in the chair where she gave him his tattoo. He’s wearing the same clothes as he was two nights before when she saw him in the bar.

“It will kill you one way or the other,” he says. “The desert doesn’t like newcomers. It fights back.”

“I’ve heard.” The previous night returns to Swan in fragments. “You found me.”

“You’re lucky.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“What were you doing?” Kurt asks.

“I owe you.”

“You can pay me. This isn’t done.” He points at his shoulder blade where she’d inked him.

“You want to add to it?”

“If you’re up to it. I’ll give you some privacy to get ready.”

Shower. Instant coffee. Then set up her station. The work will clear her mind.

“So, what do you want added?” she asks when Kurt returns.

“I want the house. The way it used to be. Put it next to the one you already did.”

With the window open to the charred remains of Kurt’s house, Swan feels confident in freehanding this new tattoo.

“Actually, make it bright pink. That’s the color Melanie repainted it just before. She lived in a bright-pink house somewhere in Los Angeles.”

“She was from LA?”

“She was Miracle born and bred, made a break for the city. I didn’t follow. I knew the desert would call her back. She brought some city ideas with her.”

“Like a bright-pink house?”

“And others.”

“A pink house doesn’t seem so wild.”

“There’s a reason most of us don’t leave,” Kurt says. “When someone goes, they don’t quite fit right when they come back. It’s hard to witness. Hard to think about the place that’s always been home not fitting right anymore. Seen it happen many times. Leaving makes you think you can change things that shouldn’t be changed. You forget that the desert is what it is, and that’s final.”

It takes her three hours to freehand the jackrabbit homestead. As before, Kurt sits silently. The piece turns out better than she’d expected. Swan worried the house would feel flat, one dimensional. But there is more life and texture than she anticipated. The pink paint job is vibrant but not garish. She included the Christmas lights she’d seen in the newspaper article and added a few cacti guarding the door. She knows they aren’t indigenous to this part of the desert, but they frame the house nicely, make it look like a home. Behind the house she shades an accurate representation of the Pinto Mountains.

When she shows the finished piece to Kurt, he doesn’t complain about the cacti. “She’d have liked it like that,” is all he says. “She liked to embellish. I’d have told her we had our own sort of cacti this side of the park, but she’d have said these are better.”

#deserthomestead

The post gets more likes than her other desert posts. It yields one inquiry about a booking, plus a comment from Karine that says, “Except for the color, sorta looks like the place behind ours before it burned. Funny.”

Kurt comes back early the next morning. Without a word he takes off his shirt. The bandage is still in place from last night. At first, Swan thinks there’s something wrong, that he changed his mind about the homestead. Then he points to the shoulder blade that’s still blank.

“Here,” he says.

“Another?”

“We’re not done.”

This happens, Swan knows. She’s experienced it firsthand—the addiction to ink. Most respectable tattoo artists are wary of it. The compulsion. The need to add and add. The collection, not the art itself.

It’s tempting to take the money and to assume the customer is always right, that he wants what he wants. She’s done some regrettable pieces, sure. The archangel Gabriel wielding an AK-47. A dead baby’s face on a dog’s body. An open wound on someone’s throat. Despite these, the artist knows when enough is enough and too much is too much. You get a sense when a client is tiptoeing toward regret, when your work will become a blight, a stain.

She knows artists who’ve inked the same person five days in a row—five separate tattoos—taken the money without giving the comedown a second thought. She’s seen the mania in the client’s eyes.

There is no mania in Kurt’s. No evident addiction. No high he’s chasing.

“The piece isn’t done,” he says.

“You want to add to the homestead?”

“It’s all one piece,” he says, sweeping a hand across his upper back. “All one story.”

“What do you want?”

“You know the place where I found you? That.”

“Just, like, a desertscape?”

“No, that particular desertscape.”

Only someone with a close connection to the desert would be able to tell one Miracle Wash vista from the next. Swan is certain Kurt is that kind of person.

“You want the view toward the mountains or to the west?”

“I want the sign. You saw it.”

“‘Expect Miracles’?”

“That’s the one.”

It’s a good project. Swan likes the combination of the landscape and the vintage lettering of the sign. They need each other—they contextualize each other.

Two decades of holding the tattoo gun, you learn not to ask for explanation or meaning, just clarity and confirmation. The tattoo is not for you to explain. It’s simply yours to create. But still, this one is odd, celebrating the failed Miracles project—the potential blight on the desert.

Maybe it’s not the project.

Maybe it’s the sentiment. Imagine the dead returned to life. That’s a miracle for you.

Then again, it’s not Swan’s business.

#expectmiracles

Swan’s first official booking is a chef from the Pacific Northwest who relocated to Joshua Tree. He contacts her after seeing the vintage sign tattoo and asks for two forearm pieces—a redwood on one and a Joshua tree on the other—and makes two appointments for subsequent days.

Swan feels the high she craves from the prospect of an afternoon of work. Her fingers buzz as she sets up her station. She can feel the electricity coursing up her arm. She flexes her hand, making the serpent’s eyes spread wide. The snake is due for a touch-up, but it’s hard for her to tattoo her dominant arm.

After the three pieces for Kurt, she feels like she’s getting back in the groove. The flow is coming easier. She can lose herself in the work quicker, trusting the steadiness in her hands. She makes a playlist—Gram Parsons and a few alternative bands that she knows try out their material at the saloon in Yucca Valley before hitting the big venues in LA. She opens the door to air out the container. Gravel and sand blow in, skittering across the floor. Then she waits.

The sun is falling to the west when the container door opens. Swan looks up. It’s not the chef. Instead she sees Lucinda and the man who drove his finger into Swan’s chest at the community center. Lucinda is holding out a cell phone. The screen is cracked, but Swan can recognize her own Instagram.

“I thought we told you to mind your own business.”

“That’s a funny thing for a person who just walked in uninvited to say.”

“Gerry showed this to me today.” Lucinda shakes the phone. “I thought I told you to leave Kurt alone. He’s been through enough without you reminding him.” She thrusts the phone in Swan’s direction. “Without you reminding us all.”

“He asked me for the reminder,” Swan says.

“But you planted the idea,” Gerry says. “Saw you do it at the bar. Saw you drawing and such.”

“What I draw isn’t your concern.”

“What you draw is exactly our concern.” Swan glimpses her version of the EXPECT MIRACLES sign behind the phone’s spidered glass.

“Kurt doesn’t like to be reminded,” Lucinda says. “Too many bad memories make him volatile.”

“Dangerous now that he’s been reminded,” Gerry says. “I’d keep my distance. Last time it was bad.”

“Last time it was real bad,” Lucinda repeats. “You’ve seen that house down toward the highway? This side of the road? Bullet holes all through the cinder block?”

Gerry flips through some of Swan’s sketches. “You don’t want that. So stay out of his business.”

“We are just trying to keep the community safe,” Lucinda says. “We’re all on our own out here, so we need to take care of ourselves.”

“Take care of you, too, now that you’re here,” Gerry says. “That’s what we are trying to do. Don’t want you to fall victim to this place now that you’ve chosen to make it your home.”

Lucinda scrolls through the phone, desert imagery flickering past in a blur. “I don’t know what all is the point of this stuff—all these photos and dumb phrases. But I do know this. Stick to posting the phony stuff, the fake crap. Don’t mess with the reality of things you don’t know.”

After they leave, Swan takes a walk to settle down. She needs her hand steady for her client that afternoon. She walks the dirt road down to Amboy, then turns right and walks back along a parallel road to her own.

She approaches her house from the back, cutting across the sand instead of sticking to the road. Before she is close she can hear furious pounding. She makes a wide circle, keeping her distance.

Kurt is ramming his fist into her door with a fury that makes the container shake. Swan crouches behind a creosote bush, waiting out his wrath.

When he’s gone, she cancels on the chef. She cannot trust her hands to do the necessary work.

That night she hears gunfire close by. She peeks through the curtain. She sees the muzzle flashes punctuating the dark in front of Kurt’s trailer—a rat-a-tat until he runs out of ammo.

Even if you want to escape, there is only so much alone time you can take. There is only so much solitude.

Over in Joshua Tree and Yucca, the bars are filled with Los Angeles refugees—arty and fashionable in their misguided vision of what desert living is like. Vintage cowboy boots, gauzy dresses, floppy hats. Everyone pretending that there is some relationship between their costume and the landscape.

It would be easy enough to slip into their ranks, become part of their desert cosplay. But it’s too late for make-believe. Swan stays home.

But that’s what you wanted. She can hear Paul’s admonition. You got what you wanted. You got away. Alone.

There’s alone and there’s alone. Paul would laugh if he knew how lonely she was. He would be happy. He would tell his friends, and they would laugh too.

Outside there’s sunshine and nothing.

Outside there’s darkness and nothing.

#desertsolitude

But still, that’s a feint. A picture unworthy of its words.

Even the small trickle of bookings that she draws with her social posts don’t distract Swan from the fact that she is in the middle of nowhere and alone. She keeps her curtain closed. But she peeks around the edges, an eye on the light in Kurt’s trailer, kept on most of the night.

He’s there. Then he’s not when he’s probably at the bar.

But sometimes he’s in the burned-out house. Swan can distinguish the crunch of his boots over the cinders from the other desert scrabble sounds.

The wind doesn’t stop. The windiest spring on record. The wind came too early. The internet is filled with stories of haboobs and sandstorms. Lost hikers. Stranded cars. Every night it sounds like screaming.

Swan maintains her vigil until one day, a week after Lucinda and Gerry visited, she can no longer be vigilant. It’s a Sunday afternoon. The loneliness so profound it feels pressurized. And what could be the harm of the bar in daytime?

Sundays are social. Often a few visitors from Twentynine and J-Tree. Sometimes travelers commuting from Nevada or Arizona on the scenic route. Kurt is one person. She’s one person. And there will be other people.

Swan’s right. Sunday late brunch and the bar is swinging. There’s an electro-honky-tonk band comprised of three twentysomething sisters.

She surveys the front and back rooms. Kurt isn’t there.

She eats a burger and drinks a beer in the back. But soon the music begins to grate, and she returns to the front room, to her usual stool.

“Missed you,” Peter says, sliding her a new beer.

“I don’t believe that,” Swan replies.

“Well, I noticed you were gone. Get out of town?”

“Keeping my distance at their suggestion.” Swan indicates the booth where Lucinda is holding court with a bunch of hardcore locals.

“They have a lot to say about what everyone else should be doing. But they take care of each other and of this place. Even if they take it too far.”

“How’s that?”

“Just don’t scratch beneath the surface of what they say goes on around here. They circle their wagons. But there are some deeper secrets best left buried.”

Swan stares across at Lucinda who’s telling a story with oversize gestures. The crowd around her roars, then parts.

Then Swan is face-to-face with Kurt.

She hadn’t seen him buried in the booth. But there he is.

She freezes, her beer halfway to her lips.

Kurt is cold stone. Then he’s rage hot.

Lucinda quiets and follows Kurt’s gaze.

Kurt rises. On one side, Lucinda pulls him back. Someone reaches for his other hand.

He shakes free.

He knocks over a beer, trying to push through the barricade of people pinning him in the booth.

Swan places her beer on the bar. She slides off her stool.

Kurt is struggling through the people trying to restrain him. His eyes are fire and fury.

Swan is at the door.

She’s in her car.

She has the engine on.

Kurt bursts through the door of the bar. Swan’s tires spin, kicking up dust and gravel.

She’s on Amboy Road before she realizes she left without paying.

Twentynine Palms. Then Joshua Tree.

She’d drive all the way back to LA if she’d thought to grab her stuff from the container.

She’s done. The desert won, apparently as it always does.

Swan realizes she’s been clenching her jaw, clenching her hands on the steering wheel, holding her breath. It’s worn her out. She pulls over in the heart of Joshua Tree to shake free of the tension, maybe grab something to drink, relax and figure out what’s next.

She buys a coffee and drinks it while leaning against the darkened storefront of a local real estate agency. Through the glass she can see the muted millennial color palette—musk pink and sage. On one wall is a mural of a stand of cacti. On the other, a roadrunner.

In front of one of the murals, a faded poster catches her gaze. She shades her eyes and peers through the glass.

EXPECT MIRACLES AT THE MIRACLE MANOR

Swan squints so she can read the type:

45 INDIVIDUAL CASITAS EACH WITH A PRIVATE SOAKING TUB

COMMUNAL POOL

CABANAS

LUXURY SPA

STARGAZING PLATFORMS

CLUBHOUSE WITH ELITE AMENITIES

GRACIOUS DINING

NATIVE PLANTINGS

And at the bottom:

A HIRSHMAN, STERNS & RADLER PROJECT

Radler.

Swan reads it three times to make sure she has the name right.

Radler.

She takes out her phone and types Kurt Radler, Miracle Manor. No hit for Kurt. But there is a Radler involved. Melanie.

Melanie Radler, associate.

What was it Kurt said? Something about her coming back with ideas beyond the desert.

Did the desert win or did Kurt?

Swan sinks to the floor. The fury with which he raged at her door. The anger in his eyes. This wasn’t the anger of a grieving husband. It was the rage of someone capable of horrible things—of . . . of . . . of.

The thought is almost too much to bear. The way the community protected him, circled him. The way they transformed his guilt into grief.

Peter cautioning her not to look beneath the surface.

No wonder they didn’t want him to be reminded.

No wonder.

The hours she’s spent in the container with this killer. The hours she spent touching him—the intimacy of the needle and her hand on his back. His smell. His skin.

Swan jams her phone in her pocket and rubs her hands as if she can shake free of her previous contact with Kurt. She knows now that she has spent her last night in the desert. She will go to the container and grab her things. Then she will drive.

He is in the chair when she opens the door.

“You came back.”

Swan’s heart catches in her throat. She presses herself against the door she’s just shut, enclosing her and Kurt once again in the small space.

“We have work to do.”

“We are done,” Swan says.

“One more. That’s it. I promise.”

“No. No more. I know what you did.”

“You don’t know anything.” Kurt strips off his shirt and turns so his back is to Swan.

She is momentarily distracted by her artwork. What had started as separate images now seems to form a more cohesive whole.

“Please,” Kurt says.

There’s a note in his voice that Swan can’t place. It’s not menace. No—pain?

“I can’t.”

“Do it, and I promise you’ll never see me again,” Kurt says. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Swan doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t know why she starts setting up her station.

“Flames,” Kurt says. “Engulf it in flames.”

“You’re kidding.”

But somehow it makes sense. Somehow Swan senses this final step will complete a story that she hadn’t known she’d started.

She will freehand it. That way the flames will rise of their own accord. That way she will bring them to life.

She begins on the lower-left back. Her hand is shaking. She worries the line will be jagged. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe that will bring an unexpected touch of realism. Swan takes a deep breath. She smooths the skin beneath the needle and she starts.

The tension in her hand makes it slow going. She has to pause to shake it out, wipe the sweat that’s popping on her brow.

A deep breath.

Another.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” Kurt says.

Swan’s hand steadies. The line emerges.

“She wasn’t the same when she came back from LA,” Kurt says. “She said she had to go. Had to try a life away from Miracle Wash. But I knew this place would call her back. We’d been married for years. Everyone told me that would be the end of it if she left. It was, but not in the way they guessed.”

Swan doesn’t want to hear—doesn’t want Kurt to mention his dead wife, his murdered wife. She drills her focus into the outline of the flames that are rising from the small of Kurt’s back toward his flank.

“Big cities give you big-city ideas. I told you that already. She saw this place different when she came back. Saw it as an opportunity, not a community. She forgot where she came from.”

Swan is conjuring a frame of flames. They will encircle the three pieces across Kurt’s shoulder blades and rise above them. The trick will be in creating the illusion of the images being devoured by fire without destroying them.

“It was her parents’ place over there where they wanted to build the Miracle Manor. She gave it to the developers for nothing. She dreamed big.”

Swan is in the zone now. Half of Kurt’s back outlined in flames. She moves to the other side.

Sometimes you can lose yourself so deeply in the work that it seems that the needle and ink are leading you, that they are guiding your hand and not the other way around. The second half of the flames fly up and away, faster than Swan would have thought possible.

“She thought she was doing the right thing. She thought it was what she called progress. She thought she’d make us money, secure our future. I told her we had everything we needed. ‘The fuck do we need out here?’ I asked.”

After two hours, it’s time to shade. Choosing the colors is simple. All the reds, oranges, and yellows in her kit, plus some blues to convey the deep, cold heart of the fire.

Swan is still in the zone. She doesn’t think. It’s as if she’s watching her hand dip in the different colors, then fan the flames higher and higher.

“I told her she was angering the community. Melanie didn’t care.”

It’s as if Swan can hear the lick of the fire. The spit and crackle. It’s as if she’s summoning its sound as well as its shape.

The flames rise. They twist. They dance—the fire leading her hand.

Swan is present and absent. She’s totally alive to the work but unaware of it simultaneously.

“I told her. I warned her. The desert always wins.”

The needle stops. Swan’s suddenly back in the room. Back holding the gun. Back aware of fire she is tattooing onto Kurt’s back.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“They always say that. That’s their excuse. But it’s not the desert.”

“What then?” Swan asks. There’s a folly in her question. Because, of course, she knows the desert can’t win. That’s lore, a myth the Miracle residents play up to scare people like her. To distract her from the truth.

“I wanted to protect her. In the end I couldn’t.” Kurt swivels in the chair and looks out the window. “You need to hurry. We don’t have much time left.”

Hurry is not in a tattoo artist’s vocabulary. Hurry is not part of the art form.

“Please,” Kurt says. His eyes urge Swan back into position.

She takes up the gun, dips the needle in red ink, resumes shading. But she’s out of the zone. She’s aware—too aware—of the odor of sweat and something else rising from Kurt’s pores. She can feel his tension—the hardpack of his back muscles, no longer pliant under her hand.

Deep breath. And then another. Look hard enough, and sometimes you can squeeze back into that portal where you can lose yourself in the work. Because that is Swan’s only option. She cannot confront the images she’s creating, the reason for them. She can only focus on the lines, the shade, the tone. The vibration of the machine. The dip of the needle. The buzz.

“I tried to protect her. I wanted to protect her. But I knew I would never leave the desert. I should have gone. I could have taken her. But this is my home. They knew that.”

Swan is in the flames that are once more rising on Kurt’s back as if he himself were actually on fire. And once more the fire emerges almost of its own accord. Once more it seems to be guiding Swan’s hand and not the other way round.

“It wasn’t the desert that won. Not this time.”

Up and up.

Twist and crackle.

“It was them.”

The flames are alive. They are dancing.

Swan can smell char and smoke.

“They came. I knew they would come. And I let it happen.”

She’s almost done. Six hours of work and the frame of flames is nearly complete. She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t stop. The fire is so real that she can hear it. She can feel it sting her nose.

“But maybe in the end, the desert did win. It kept me here. It didn’t let me go. And they killed her to protect it.”

Swan can feel heat from the fire. She can feel it radiating from Kurt’s back. Her throat is dry. Her eyes water.

She’s done. She lifts her head to wipe her brow.

Then she sees the smoke curling beneath the door of the container. Swan rolls back from her station.

She drops the gun.

“Finished?”

“Yes.”

“Go. Go now. By now, they’ll have figured out that I’ve told you. They know I’m no longer keeping their secrets.”

The smoke is flowing fast, a trickle that is quickly becoming a stream—soon a river.

Swan takes a step toward the door, but Kurt pulls her back. “The window,” he says.

She crosses the room and opens the window. She hauls herself out and lands with a thud on the ground. The container is ringed with fire—a flaming circle that frames it just like the fire she inked on Kurt’s back.

Swan looks back into the room. Kurt is standing, his back to her.

“Come on,” she says.

But he heads the other way—toward the door. He reaches for the handle, then flings it wide.

The fire is closer on the other side—closer and higher. A wall.

Swan can see a horde of people silhouetted behind the leaping flames—standing sentinel over their destruction. She knows their shapes, their voices that carry in the night. She knows what they have done and are doing again.

It was never the desert. It was always them.

The flames have reached the mouth of the container. Kurt stays put.

It’s now or never. If Swan doesn’t jump the fire, it will be too late.

“Kurt!” He doesn’t look back. “Kurt.”

Then she pulls her T-shirt up so it covers her head, lowers her shoulders, and rushes through the blaze.

Swan runs, stumbling through chaparral. Tripping on rocks. Stumbling into dry washes.

She looks back only once to see the fire close tight around the container, then swallow it whole.

She imagines she hears Kurt roar. But that’s not possible. The conflagration is too loud—the explosion as the propane tank blasts into the night.

She pats her pocket, finds her phone. Takes photos of the fire against the dark desert night.

#therealdesert

They will imagine the story died with Kurt.

They will imagine that she did too.

But Swan carries the story with her.

A small victory over the desert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2019 Maria Kanevskaya

Ivy Pochoda is the author of Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, and Sing Her Down. She won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Edgar Award, among other prizes.

ALSO BY IVY POCHODA

Sing Her Down

These Women

Visitation Street

Wonder Valley

The Art of Disappearing

Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof (written as Ivy Claire)

Epoca: The River of Sand (written as Ivy Claire)

The spellbinding thriller from the award-winning author of These Women

“Sing Her Down hits like a shotgun blast.”

—Dennis Lehane, author of Small Mercies

Available wherever books are sold