(First published in the Indiana Review as winner of the 2020 ½ K prize)

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• In the photo, you’ve grown a beard. You tell me the wildfire is amazing, apocalyptic to look at. Tall trees exploding around you. The red sky, and long cracks of flame over the hills. I walk our dog in the haze and wait. Pass the old stone wall. You’re still safe, despite the flaming sheep running down the slope, the cows mincing on burned hooves. Blackened acres. Five years ago, nineteen Hot Shots from your hometown died in the Yarnell Hill Fire. The next year we hiked to the makeshift memorial on Granite Mountain. You’d been in school with some of the dead men when they were living, boys. This week your crew’s controlled burn jumped the line. You worked past midnight, stamping sparks, your face lit and flickering. On the phone, we talk about dying reefs. How inmates do this work for a dollar a day. Less. The shame of it. You say a brushfire turned the base of each clump of grass into a black anemone; singed the tops off the stalks. You say you walked with the crew slowly in your primary colors over the crest of the hill, the sky behind you otherworldly blue. And much later the rains came, and the hills filled with steam, and then you were allowed to rest.