Melody Crumbley had been crying for forty minutes when the coyote took her bunny's eye. She was six years old and sitting on the hot gravel beside the family sedan, in the shadow of a sagging convenience store with faded red letters. Her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Boots, lay in her lap with one plastic eye missing. The eye had popped off in the car. She had held it in her palm the whole drive, and she had dropped it when her mother yanked her out by the wrist. Since then she had wailed. Loud. Wet. The kind of crying that made truckers turn their heads. Her father sat in the driver's seat with the door open and his forehead on the steering wheel. Her mother was inside the store buying aspirin. Melody's grandmother mumbled in the back seat about soldiers in a trench. "Shut up already," said her brother Dexter. He crouched in the dirt beside her, poking an ant with a bottle cap. His striped shirt was stained with orange soda. His pockets bulged with things he had stolen from the glove box. He grinned like he was waiting for something to break. Melody sobbed harder. "I want his eye." "It's right there, dummy." She followed his finger. The tiny black bead sat in the gravel by the front tire, catching sun. Then a shape slid out from under the car. It was thin and orange, ribs showing through patchy fur, snout low to the ground. A coyote, or something close to one. It sniffed at the shiny thing. Its blue eyes flicked to Melody and did not care. Melody stopped crying. The coyote's tongue flashed. The eye was gone. The coyote turned and trotted toward the dry brush behind the store, ears back, tail low. "It ate it," Dexter said. He sounded delighted. Melody stood up. Mr. Boots dangled from her fist. Her cheeks were still wet, but her mouth was a hard flat line. She took one step after the coyote, then another. "Dad," Dexter called, bored. "Melody's running away." Her father did not lift his head. Melody ran. Her sandals slapped the gravel. The coyote glanced back, saw her coming, and picked up speed. It slipped between two dry shrubs at the edge of the lot and vanished. Melody reached the shrubs and stopped. The scrub stretched out flat and yellow for a long way. She could not see the coyote. She could not see the eye. She could see a narrow track pressed into the dust where its paws had gone. The track led toward the back of the store, past a stack of crushed crates, toward somewhere she was not allowed to go. Melody wiped her nose on Mr. Boots's ear and followed the tracks.

The paw tracks led Melody past the crushed crates and out into the flat yellow scrub. She held Mr. Boots by one ear. Her sandals kicked up dust. She could not see the coyote anymore, only the little dents its feet had left in the dirt. She followed them because the eye was inside the coyote and the coyote was somewhere ahead. She cried while she walked. Not the loud kind now. A hiccupping, wet kind that shook her shoulders and made her nose run onto the rabbit's fur. She wiped it. She kept walking. The sun pressed down on the top of her head. Then she heard something that was not her. A dry buzz. Fast. Close. Melody stopped with one sandal in the air. The snake sat coiled in the dirt three steps ahead of her. Its body was thick and patterned brown and black, stacked in tight rings. Its head was lifted. Its tongue flicked. The tail at the back shook so fast it blurred, and the rattling sound came out of the blur like a broken toy. She put her foot down slow, behind her, not forward. The snake watched. She sobbed once and clapped her free hand over her mouth. The rattle went louder. She froze. Behind her, gravel crunched. "Whoa," Dexter said. Her brother stood ten feet back in his striped shirt, pockets bulging, grinning the grin he wore right before something broke. He had followed her. Of course he had followed her. He would not miss this. "Don't move," he whispered, too loud. "That thing'll bite your face off." Melody's shoulders shook. A new sob climbed up her throat. The rattle answered it, faster. "Stop crying," Dexter hissed. "Stop crying, stop crying —" She couldn't. Her mouth opened. The wail was coming. Dexter bent down and grabbed a rock the size of a plum. He hefted it. His tongue poked out the side of his mouth. "Dexter," Melody whispered. "Don't." He threw it. The rock missed the snake. It smacked the dirt beside its coils and bounced. The snake struck at the rock, missed, and whipped sideways into the low brush. The rattle kept going for a second, then stopped. The scrub swallowed the sound. Melody stood there with her mouth open and no noise coming out. Dexter laughed. "I saved your life." He picked up another rock and tossed it in his palm. "You owe me forever." Melody looked down. The snake was gone. The paw tracks were gone too. The scuffle had churned the dirt where the coyote's trail had been, and the trail past that point ran into hard-baked ground where nothing pressed in. She turned in a slow circle. Scrub in every direction. No tracks. No store behind her that she could find. She hugged Mr. Boots against her chest and did not cry. She had nothing to follow now, and her brother was smiling.

Melody stood in the churned dirt and knew the trail was dead. The coyote could be a mile away by now. Its jaws could have already crunched Mr. Boots's glass eye down its throat. Or the eye could be sitting in the dust between two shrubs, ten feet away, or a hundred. She could walk in circles forever and find nothing. Dexter tossed his second rock and caught it. "So where's your dumb coyote now?" Melody didn't answer. She squeezed the rabbit tight and looked at the ground near her sandals. If she couldn't follow the coyote, she would follow what fell from it. She dropped to her knees. "What are you doing?" "Looking." She crawled in a slow ring around the churned patch. Her knees pressed dents into the hot dirt. She pushed aside a dry tuft of grass. Nothing. She pushed aside another. A beetle. A pebble. A curl of foil from a candy wrapper. Dexter watched for a while. Then he squatted down beside her, because he was bored, and boredom always made him worse or better and she couldn't tell yet which. "If it ate it, it's gone," he said. "It's gonna come out its butt tomorrow." "Shut up." "I'm helping." He started flipping over rocks. "Coyotes puke stuff up. I saw it on TV. Bones and fur and stuff." Melody stopped. "They do?" "If it's too hard to eat." He shrugged. "Glass is hard." She crawled faster. She checked under a flat stone. Under a thornbush. Behind a fat cactus with a split down its side. Her fingers found a wet clump of matted grey hair, sticky at the middle, the size of a walnut. She poked it. Something inside clicked against her fingernail. She pulled the clump open. A black plastic disc sat in the middle. Mr. Boots's eye. Chewed at the edge. Dull with spit. Real. Melody sat back on her heels. Her mouth opened, then closed. She wasn't crying. She had forgotten how, for a second. "No way," Dexter said. "No way. Give it." "No." She closed her fist around it. She stood up. The scrub still stretched in every direction. She still didn't know the way back. But the eye was in her hand, warm and gross and hers, and Mr. Boots was under her arm with one empty socket waiting. Then, far off, she heard a car horn. Two short honks. Her father's honks. The tired, flat kind he used when he wanted them in the station wagon and didn't want to get out. Dexter's head snapped up. "Dad." Melody turned toward the sound. It came from somewhere past the scrub, thin and small. She started walking. She held the eye tight. She didn't look to see if Dexter followed. She only had to reach the horn before it stopped.

Melody pushed through the last of the scrub and saw the store. The convenience store sat where she had left it, faded sign and striped awning shimmering in the heat. The lime green station wagon was parked crooked by the pump. And her mother was outside it. Marge stood in the dust with her arms crossed over her flowered dress. Pink curlers bounced when she turned her head. Her slippers were already gray with grit. She spotted Melody at the edge of the lot and her face went the color of a stovetop coil. "Melody Ann Crumbley. Get over here." Melody's stomach dropped. She knew that voice. It was the voice that came before a slap on the back of the thighs, right there in the parking lot, in front of anyone driving by. Dexter slowed down behind her. He was suddenly not in a hurry to catch up. Marge marched three steps and grabbed Melody's arm. "Where have you been. Where. Do you know how long we've sat here. Your father honked six times. Six." "Mama—" "Don't Mama me." Marge spun her around. Her free hand lifted. Melody shoved her closed fist up between them. She opened her fingers. The glass eye sat in her sweaty palm. Dull. Scratched. Real. Marge stopped. Her hand hung in the air. "What is that." "Mr. Boots's eye. The coyote ate it and I found it. In a hairball. Dexter said they puke stuff up and he was right and I found it." Her mother stared at the eye. Her mouth worked. Melody could see her deciding. "A hairball," Marge said. "Yes." "You went into the desert. For a hairball." "Yes." Marge's hand came down slowly, but it did not land on Melody. It landed on her own hip. She breathed out through her nose. "Get in the car. Both of you. Now. Your father has been sitting there like a lump and your grandma needs her pill and I am not spending one more minute in this parking lot." Melody scrambled for the back door. Through the window she saw her father in the driver's seat, one hand on the wheel, staring straight ahead like he had not moved in an hour. In the far back, Edith sat with her thick glasses tipped forward, mumbling at the ceiling. Dexter climbed in behind Melody and slammed the door. Melody sat down and squeezed Mr. Boots to her chest. The eye was in her fist. The spanking hadn't come. Then she looked at the rabbit's face. The empty socket was a small ragged hole. The stitching around it had pulled loose over the years. She pressed the glass disc against it. It slid in a little. It slid back out. There was nothing holding it in place. No glue. No thread. Nothing. Marge started the engine. The station wagon lurched forward. Melody's fist tightened around the loose eye as the store shrank behind them.

The station wagon rolled down the cracked road. Melody sat with Mr. Boots on her lap. She pinched the glass eye into the socket. It slipped out. She pushed it in again. It rolled onto her knee. The rabbit's face looked worse than before, the eyelid puckered around a hole that would not hold. She sniffed. Her chest hitched. The wailing was starting to come back up her throat. "Don't," Marge said from the front, not turning around. "Don't you start again. I swear to God." Dexter kicked the back of the seat and grinned at her. "It's gonna fall out on the floor and roll under Daddy's pedal." "Shut up." Melody clamped her hand over the socket. In the far back, Edith sat wedged against the door. Her thick glasses hid her eyes. She had been mumbling since the pump. Melody had learned not to listen. Grandma talked to the ceiling and the ceiling never talked back. But now Edith turned her head. The lenses caught the light. "Girl," she said. Clear as a bell. Marge glanced in the rearview. "Ma, hush." Edith ignored her. She held out one spotted hand toward Melody. The fingers opened and closed. "Give it here." Melody stared. Grandma had not spoken a real word to her in as long as she could remember. Just noises about a war nobody could name. Melody crawled over the seat with the rabbit and the eye in her fists. Edith took Mr. Boots. Her hands were steady. She turned the rabbit under the window light and studied the ragged socket like a woman reading a price tag. "Needle," she said. "We don't have one, Grandma." Edith lifted her chin. She reached up and pulled a hairpin from the white bun at the back of her head. A wisp of hair fell loose. She bit the plastic tip off the pin and spat it on the floor mat. Then she plucked a long thread from the hem of her scarf and wet it in her mouth. "Ma, what are you doing back there," Marge snapped. "Fixing it," Edith said. Melody held her breath. Edith threaded the hairpin. She pushed the sharpened metal through the felt above the socket. The point came out clean. She looped the thread around the glass eye's rim, drew it snug, and knotted it against the rabbit's cheek. Three more stitches. A tug. A bite to cut the thread. She handed Mr. Boots back. The eye sat where it belonged. It did not slide. It did not roll. Mr. Boots looked at Melody with two eyes for the first time in a year. Melody's mouth fell open. "Grandma." Edith settled back against the door. Her glasses tipped forward again. But she watched Melody now, alert, waiting. "Don't tell your mother," she whispered, "that I can hear her."