Victoria let the hot New Mexico sun toast her skin, melting back into the old lounge chair she’d drug out onto the patio. She lay as still and limp as if she were sleeping, but her closed eyes darted, tracing shapes, endeavoring to make sense of them, highlighted against shades of orange and red, the sunlight creating shadow puppet shows against her lowered eyelids.
“Vic!” her mother called through the screen door.
“What?” She forced the word out, unwilling to move even her lips any more than she had to.
“Grandmother will be here any minute! Get in here and help with the ice cream!”
“Ugh!” Victoria groaned in protest, and reluctantly sat up.
She swung her feet down onto the hot concrete, and blinked her eyes against the sun. She was momentarily blinded, and raised a hand to block the harsh light. Everything was fuzzy, washed out, and the landscape seemed different. The ranch’s main corrals were normally visible from the patio, just past the windmill that pumped water into multiple tanks for the cattle her mother ran. Now, however, she could not see the windmill at all, and where the corrals should have been, there was a makeshift enclosure of yucca poles, rough, dried and grayed stalks from the spiky desert plant. There were a few horses visible inside the ring, and a woman, a stranger to Victoria, was on the ground beside them.
She blinked her eyes again, but the scene remained. “Um, Mom…”
“Victoria! Come on!”
When her mother called her by her full name, she meant business. Victoria stumbled toward the door, unsure of what she had seen.
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