When we woke up, everywhere we looked, parachutes. Pierced on church steeples, crumpled in meadows. Cast over roof gutters and laid bristling against treetops. They sagged from branches like the carcasses of ghosts.

The leak started when they were sitting on the couch: Frank reading the paper, Martha knitting, the radio playing a song they had danced to once, though neither could quite remember where. The ceiling opened and spilled right onto the cushion between them, and they turned to watch it pour.

If the world ends in fire, my family will survive. Here’s the truth: after the house burned down, I was restless for twenty moons and filled with more shame than the prosecuted. The guilt was too massive for my eleven-year-old body to carry, but I stored it in the pit of my stomach for five years.