Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips Page B

make an alligator shadow puppet with chomping teeth.
    Ren did not tell Silas any of this. She said, “I chewed my nails even though my mother didn’t like it. I think I disappointed her.”
    When she had been silent long enough that it was obvious she was done talking, he sat up and leaned toward her, slowly. His hat fell to the ground. She forgot about the pleasure of the fine, taut string stretched between them. She could smell sweat and dirt, but when he touched her face with the whole of his hand, she could smell juniper on his fingers. She ran her tongue along the rough edges of his teeth, and he made a sound she enjoyed. He tasted of salt.

four
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    It seemed a daunting task at first to interpret the very subtle indications. To the untrained eye, much of the site appears to merely represent nothing more than the rocky terrain. . . . But with training, the . . . evidence became observable as [a] long-abandoned home.
    â€”From “Rebuilding an Ancient Pueblo: The Victorio Site in Regional Perspective” by Karl W. Laumbach and James L. Wakeman,
Sixty Years of Mogollon Archaeology: Papers from the Ninth Mogollon Conference
, 1999
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    They had a couple of hours left before they needed to head back to the bunkhouse. Silas had gone to find Ed so he could take a photo of the floor level for this last room.
    Ren stared at the mountain of sifted dirt looming over the screener. Kissing Silas had blown her concentration. He’d pulled away from her, touched her jaw, and said they should probably get back to work. So they had. But then they had spent a reasonable portion of the afternoon staring at each other’s mouth. And that was exactly why she should stick to digging and screening and note-taking instead of sliding her hands under a man’s shirt and cataloging the feel of his teeth at her neck and the dusty salty taste of his mouth.
    It was a distraction. She reminded herself that the artist should be the most important thing. For all she knew, he fell in love on every dig. Or he spent his free time chatting up housekeepers and geologists. She was the only woman in the entire canyon, and their bedrooms were next door to each other. For all his words about himself, she had no idea what he really thought of her, what he really wanted of her. She was, she acknowledged, the low-hanging fruit.
    And yet.
    She lowered her head, rubbing at her face with both hands. The dirt coating her palms smelled almost pleasant. Complicated. She thought of his hand on her face. She could smell the detergent on her long-sleeved shirt. And she could smell juniper.
    When she lifted her head, the pueblo was all around her. A living, thriving pueblo. As solid-seeming as Scott perched on the edge of her bed.
    The sun was higher in the sky than it had been a few seconds before, and she squinted against the light. The ground was green, not brown, with patches of thick, tall grass swaying. Stalks of corn grew in the distance.
    The air was cooler, and it felt moist. Ren crossed her arms over her chest and stood.
    The even expanse of dry land that had seemed so wide open now felt hemmed in by the low buildings dug into the dirt, rising, squat and steady. The flat roofs came to Ren’s eye level and above. The ends of horizontal wooden beams—vigas—protruded from the walls in straight rows just under the roofs. The flat tops of the structures were punctuated by ladders rising from the interior rooms and by the shapes of women working and children playing.
    She felt the relief, nearly overwhelming—finally the ground was opening up to her. She wouldn’t let herself acknowledge it. If she got back in her own head, she’d lose the vision. She breathed in the juniper, still heavy in the air, and her eyesight sharpened.
    Two women were sitting on the nearest roof, crushing something on a grinding stone. Ren could see the muscles working in their tanned, bare backs—one had loose hair