The View From Who I Was by Heather Sappenfield

promises to Sugeidi and Mom? Those were a challenge. Heal people? Make life better? Three months.
    She studied the pipe again, thought of the inhalations rushing through that carved eagle-head bowl and along that shank. It occurred to me that the flute’s music was nothing more than the master’s exhalations released as notes. She wondered at the notes of ordinary breaths. Was there some creature that heard breath’s music? Maybe the stars listened. Or maybe that inky space between them.
    Corpse bolted up, listening to her breaths, and moved to the fireplace. She lunged up onto the hearth, gripped the carved mantle, and reached high with her right hand. Her two fingers grazed the pipe’s bowl. She hopped and hit it with her fingertips. The bowl bounced off its nail and struck the crown of her head. She caught the trailing rawhide with her clumsy two fingers and thumb, and it raced through them till her grip closed on the feathers. She lifted those feathers to her face, rubbing her head, and grinned.

Part Two
    To Die Of Thirst

Twelve
    From Oona’s journal:
    Water must change and transition and renew itself.
    â€”Viktor Schauberger
    Mr. Handler exited the highway and barreled down a ramp that led to nothing. Literally. Corpse couldn’t even see a road. Just endless Utah desert. Panic crept down her neck. She swallowed against how people at school would gossip about her leaving with Mr. Handler. DEAD GIRL SUCKS UP.
    The ramp’s asphalt ended, and Mr. Handler’s Prius bounced onto dirt that hooked left, under the highway in a one-lane concrete tunnel. They burst into light at its far end, and still there was nothing but junipers, piñon pines, and sagebrush. Here and there a skiff of snow yawned in a tree’s shadow. On a sign faded from blue to mostly white, Corpse read through bullet holes the name Sego Ridge , and, beneath it, Pop. Sego Ridge’s population was just a shot-out hole.
    Mr. Handler glanced at Corpse as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and navigated the washboard road, veering around rocks like land mines. An open bag of pretzels skittered off the console and hit Corpse’s feet. She retrieved it and set it in her lap.
    The road started climbing, growing steeper, steeper, till it seemed they drove into the sky, the dash inches from Corpse’s chin. She listened to the blood rushing in her ears, the tires’ thump over washboard. A steeple appeared, and as the road flattened, it became a tiny church sagging toward the dirt, faded beyond any hint of color. A pink house-trailer stood two hundred yards to the right. A rusty tin shed was tacked to its side. A beat-up orange truck, one rear panel primer gray and its back bumper wired on at an angle, was parked out front. A mammoth cottonwood stretched its winter limbs over the trailer and the truck.
    As the Prius climbed again, Corpse leaned forward for balance till the dash neared her chin again, and then the road leveled off. Here perched two more house-trailers, one faded yellow, one faded green, worn tires scattered over the roofs. The rusted-out bodies of old cars surrounded both.
    At the yellow trailer, a sheet of plywood covered a big window, probably the living room, and the front door was open. Two kids stood outside, one in just a diaper. A skinny black dog sprinted to the Prius and chased it with vicious barks. The dog gave up and Corpse twisted round, looking through me, to watch it out the rear window. It barked and bared its teeth.
    I thought of the trailer park down the valley, where Sugeidi’s kids lived. Where she spent her days off. Though we’d never visited Sugeidi’s family, we’d studied that park as we’d driven by it. Those trailers were painted cheery colors and had little patches of lawn. The only time we’d seen poverty like this was on vacations, when we’d ridden with Mom and Dad in limos from foreign airports to five-star hotels. We’d never