On the morning of April 14 (Black Sunday), fifteen-year-old Asphodel "Dell" Oletsky refuses to attend Mass with her uncle Harp Oletsky, choosing instead to practice basketball alone on the secret prairie court west of town. She reflects on her brief, painful experience attending St. Agnieszka, where Polish parishioners blamed her dead mother Lada's elopement for her murder. Dell has rejected church in favor of basketball, her only meaningful form of devotion.

Dell recounts her arrival in Uz on July 4, 1933, after her mother was murdered (the killer never found) and detectives located her uncle Harp. Her hopes of finding kinship with Harp collapsed immediately—he remembered Lada only as a small child, not the vibrant, flawed woman Dell knew. Dell feels she is her mother's sole pallbearer, watching her real memory of Lada fade into ventriloquy. She sleeps in her dead mother's bed and considers Uz a place where only her bones could ever belong.

Dell describes the brutal drought conditions: ninety-degree heat for weeks, vanishing topsoil, hardpan earth, and cars driving with headlights at noon. She walks four miles to the secret concrete court Coach poured on abandoned land, where Uz Poultry & Eggs—her girls' basketball team—practices through dust storms by car headlights. They are four games from a second consecutive Region 7 championship. Basketball is Dell's sole reason to live, the outlet for her anger over her mother's murder and her exile.

While practicing alone, Dell notices a black bar floating on the southeastern horizon—not an ordinary mirage. The cloud begins racing toward her, the wind howling. She keeps dribbling, the ball her only anchor. Uncle Harp arrives in his Dodge truck, terrified, and orders her into the cab as the storm bears down on them.