Comrade Snarky's eyes roll up to show all white, and she fans the air with her floppy black felt beret, saying, “Patchouli . . .”

Our writers' colony, our desert island, should be nicely heated and air-conditioned, or so we've been led to believe. We'll each have our own room. Lots of privacy, so we won't need a lot of clothes. Or so we've been told.

We have no reason to expect otherwise.

The borrowed tour bus would be found, but we wouldn't. Not for the three months we'd leave the world. Those three months we'd spend writing and reading our work. Getting our stories perfect.

Last on board, around another block and through another tunnel, waiting at our last pickup spot, was the Duke of Vandals. His fingers smudged and stained from pastel crayons and charcoal pencils. His hands blotched with silk-screen inks, and his clothes stiff with drabs and spatters of dried paint. All these colors still only gray or black, the Duke of Vandals is sitting, waiting there on a metal toolbox heavy with tubes of oil paint, brushes, watercolors, and acrylics.

He stands, making us wait while he shakes back his blond hair and twists a red bandana around to make a ponytail. Still standing in the doorway of the bus, the Duke of Vandals looks down the aisle at us all, spotlighted by Agent Tattletale's video camera, he says, “It's about time . . .”

No, we weren't idiots. We'd never agree to be stranded if we were really going to be cut off. None of us were so bored with this silly, below-average, watered-down, mediocre world that we'd sign our own death wish. Not us.

A living situation like this, of course, we expected fast access to emergency health care, just in case someone stumbled on the stairs or their appendix decided to burst.

So all we had to decide was: What to bring in our one suitcase.

This workshop, it's already supposed to have hot and cold running water. Soap. Toilet paper. Tampax. Toothpaste.

The Duke of Vandals left his landlord a note that said: Screw your lease.

Even more important was what we didn't bring. The Duke of Vandals didn't bring cigarettes, his mouth teeth-grinding wads of nicotine gum. Saint Gut-Free didn't bring pornography. Countess Foresight and the Matchmaker didn't bring their wedding rings.

As Mr. Whittier would say, “What stops you in the outside world, that will stop you in here.”

The rest of the disaster wasn't our fault. We had no reason, none whatsoever, to bring a chainsaw. Or a sledgehammer or a stick of dynamite. Or a gun. No, on this desert island, we'd be completely, completely safe.

Before sunrise, on this sweet new day we won't ever see happen.

So we'd been led to believe. Maybe too safe.

It's because of all this, we brought nothing that could save us.

Around another corner, along another stretch of expressway, down an off-ramp, we drove, until Mr. Whittier said, “Turn here.” Gripping the chrome frame of his wheelchair, he jabbed a beef-jerky finger. The skin withered and shrunk, the fingernail bone-yellow.

Comrade Snarky poked her nose up and sniffed, saying, “Am I going to have to live with that patchouli stink for the next twelve weeks?”

Miss Sneezy coughed into her fist.

And Saint Gut-Free steered the bus down a tight, dark alley. Between buildings so close they splashed back the brown spit of the Matchmaker, tobacco spattering the front of his bib overalls. Walls so close the concrete skinned the hairy elbow the Missing Link had resting on the sill of his open window.

Until the bus pulls to a stop and the door folds open to show another door—this second door steel, in a concrete wall. The alley so narrow you can't see down any length. Mrs. Clark slips out of her seat, down the steps, and jerks open a padlock.

Then she's gone, inside, and the bus door opens on a slot of pure nothing. Just black. The slot just wide enough to squeeze through. From inside, you catch the needle-sharp smell of mouse urine. Mix in the same smell as opening an old, damp book half eaten by silverfish. Mix in the smell of dust.

And from the darkness, Mrs. Clark's voice says, “Hurry and get inside.”

Saint Gut-Free will join us after he leaves the bus parked for the police to find.

Ditches the evidence. Blocks, maybe miles away. Where they'll find it, untraceable back to this steel doorway into concrete and dark. Our new home. Our desert island.

All of us crowded into that moment between the bus and the pitch-dark. At that last moment outside, Agent Tattletale tells us, “Smile.”

What Mr. Whittier would call the camera behind the camera behind the camera.

That first moment of our new, secret life, the spotlight hits us, so bright and fast it leaves the dark more dark than black. That instant leaves us grabbing hold of each other by the coats and elbows, trying to stay upright, blinking-blind but trusting, while Mrs. Clark's voice leads us through that steel doorway.

That video moment: the truth about the truth.

“Smell is very important,” Mother Nature says. Lugging her cardboard box, her brass bells tinkling, clutching the dark, she says, “Don't laugh, but in aromatherapy, they warn you never to light a sandalwood candle around bayberry incense . . .”

Under Cover

A Poem About Mother Nature

“I tried to become a nun,” says Mother Nature, “because I needed to hide out.”

She didn't count on the drug test.

Mother Nature onstage, her arms are vined with red henna graffiti. From her fingertips

to the shoulder straps of her tie-dyed, rainbow-colored cotton smock.

Around her neck, a choker of brass temple bells has turned the skin

green. Her skin shining with patchouli oil.

“Who knew?” Mother Nature says. “And not just urinalysis.”

She says, “They test with hair and fingernail samples.”

She says, “That's plus the background check.”

The morals clause. The background check. The credit check. The dress code.

Standing onstage, barefoot, instead of a spotlight,

instead of a smile or frown, a movie fragment of night sky washes across her face.

A galaxy of stars and moons.

Her lips red with beet juice. Her eyelids smeared with yellow saffron dust.

There, a shifting mask of pink nebulas. Of planets with rings and craters.

Mother Nature says, “They ask for too many letters of reference.”

Plus a polygraph test. Four pieces of picture ID.

“Four,” Mother Nature says, holding up the hennaed fingers of one hand. Her

bracelets of brass wire and dirty silver, rattling windchimes around her wrist.

She says, “Nobody has four pieces of picture ID . . .”

To become a nun, she says, you have to take a sit-down test, worse than

the SATs and the LSATs, put together. And full of story problems, such as:

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

All of this, Mother Nature says, just to find out:

“If you're marrying Christ on the rebound.”

Her long hair pulled away from her face, braided and falling down her back,

Mother Nature says,

“Of course, I failed. Not just the drug test—I failed everything.”

Not just as a nun, but throughout most of her life . . .

She shrugs, her freckled shoulders under the tie-dyed straps,

“So here I am.”

The constellations shifting and crawling across her face, Mother Nature says,

“I still needed someplace to hide.”

Foot Work

A Story by Mother Nature

Don't laugh, but in aromatherapy, they warn you never to light a lemon-cinnamon candle at the same time you light a clove candle and a cedar-nutmeg candle. They just don't tell you why . . .