Annie Quinn woke up angry for the second time in the same week. She was so angry she picked up the Winchester .30-.30 that slept next to her and looked out the hay loft window at the rooster, his head tilted back and crowing at the top of his lungs, and she thought about taking him out. The second her hand touched the cool silver plate on the gun’s stock, she calmed some, and realized it wasn’t the rooster she was mad at. It wasn’t anything in particular at all, and that was the problem. She was tight in the neck and shoulders, her brain felt pinched, and she was already thinking up ways of picking a fight with Noreen. Annie pulled her boots on, grabbed the gun up, and climbed down from the loft. She walked out of the barn, took a deep breath of the dawn air, rested her gun against the wall, and walked over to feed the chickens and pigs.

The chickens cheered her up some. She liked watching them flap and coo around her to whatever pattern she could think to create with the grain. She made a sun with rays. The big brown hen, Juniper, patrolled the circle of the sun, aggressively eating her way around it.
"Pig," Annie muttered.
Things turned bad again with the pigs. Wilma, the sow, came up like she had something to say and Annie forgot about the slop pail in her hand for a moment too long. Big Ed, their hog, rammed into the backs of her knees and nearly knocked her down. He knocked the slop pail down, which was his goal, and on its way down it coated the left leg of Annie's jeans with rotted mush. She gave him a vicious kick, which he didn't feel, and stormed out of the pen without giving them their corn. The pigs screamed in indignation once they realized what was going on. Even Ed felt a little bad after he ate up all of the fallen slop.

Annie stayed angry all the way back to her gun, but picking it up worked again, and she decided to give the morning one more chance. She walked back to the barn, put the gun against the rail of one of the stalls, and picked up the milk pail. The milk cow, Yellow Girl, must have sensed that Annie was out of sorts because she kicked the pail out of her hand and spilled have a bucket full. Annie managed to control herself long enough to squeeze another half a bucket out of Yellow Girl and salvage the morning's chores, but when she caught her finger on the latch of the stall on the way out, she lost her temper entirely and chucked the pail against the inside of the barn door.
"Goddamit!" she yelled, her voice cracking, and then sucked angrily at her finger.
She grabbed her gun back up and walked to the ranch house. Noreen was in the kitchen making breakfast, already dressed, coiffed, and worrying.

"I think we should have Thomas for dinner tonight..." she said as she heard the door bang.
"Don't talk to me," Annie said. "I don't want to talk to anyone."
Noreen shrugged at Annie and pulled a nice looking batch of biscuit out of the dutch oven. She put two on a plate, poured a cup of coffee and set them down in front of Annie, who was sitting at the breakfast table wiping at the slop stain on her leg.
"No milk unless you bring it," Noreen said.
Which wasn't true. There was still some of yesterday's in the cooler. Annie snarled, and dipped a biscuit into her coffee. It wasn't hard to tell when Annie was angry. Her face was an open book. The pale skin stretched tight across her cheekbones, which were wide and high. She had big teeth, a flat nose, and brown cat eyes. When she was happy her whole face was smile and twinkle. When she was upset her whole face was scowl and glare. She had a gap between her two front teeth and the sun had freckled her cheeks and standing in the middle of the kitchen she looked a little bit like a snake mad to strike.

Noreen, Annie's sister-in-law, couldn't have been any more different. She was a tall, big-breasted, high hipped Irish blonde. She wore full skirts and white high-collared tops with a broach at the throat, even though there hadn't been anyone around to notice since Jacob Quinn, Noreen's husband, had died in the small pox outbreak two years before. All of the Quinn men had died. First Elisha, Annie's oldest brother, shot down in a dispute with Jean-Baptiste Le Gris the Younger over nothing. Then her father Andrew, of heartbreak. Then Margaret, Elisha's wife, and Rorey their child, and finally Jacob, Noreen's husband and Annie's only friend, in the small pox outbreak.

Noreen had survived the sickness and Annie had been miraculously untouched by it. They had lived alone together on the ranch for almost two years. In the winter Annie slept in the house for heat, but she didn't like it, and even before the snow melted and the stock was out to pasture in the spring, she slept in the hayloft of the barn.