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DELICIOUS by James Cato

December 21, 2020

Like most Saturday mornings, I’m alone cleaning the streets. The morning sun hurries through the cloudless sky, already buttering me with sweat, though Las Vegas sleeps. I slog around with trash pincers and make peace with the place through solitude.

Before, I worked afternoons and wore my baseball cap with the army patch. People asked questions. Where was I deployed? What’s it like being a woman in war? Did I ever shoot someone? War stories drew people in. They tried to stare through the ugly by looking at me.

I’m picking up after a parade; I can tell by the debris. Streamers stick to the sidewalk like snakeskin. Buzzards hunch atop asphalt burgers and chicken bones, sharing sticky leftovers with lizards and scorpions. I call it desert-dessert. Delicious. They help me clean.

When I wore my hat, some people would blame me, yell at me. Others would thank me. Nobody knew any better. I came from a small town, the only way out spelled A-R-M-Y. At eighteen I copied the boys and picked up my M16 with dreams of returning to a big city. I guess it worked—Vegas, baby.

I pause, my sack heavy with trampled food, fancy pants, a sparkly shoe, ragdoll condoms, a brunette wig, and Everclear in a grenade bottle. A creepy plastic bag crinkles in the center of the road, juddering in the heat mirages, weighed down by a shrouded cylinder. I drift toward it like a hooked fish.

I was asked if I got flashbacks. People heard of IEDs disguised as garbage, but they hadn’t heard of daisy-rigging. That’s when one decoy IED, planted somewhere obvious, is linked to another, hidden. You never have a clue. To those asking, I just said: It gets easier.

My jeans swish against the steel under them, long jeans because my legs don’t get hot anymore. A vulture beats her wings to defend her breakfast. I promise her I’m not interested. A scorpion scuttles by, tail up. I give my pincers a few clicks in solidarity. A spiky lizard pauses in my shadow. He can only go a few minutes exposed without cooking alive, so I rest, offering my shade. I eye the heat weeping from that ominous bag.

Some people were curious; some were killing the cat. The latter quizzed me on my childhood. Where I grew up, we'd placed dime bets on lizard-scorpion fights in jelly jars. “So you’re a tomboy,” the people replied. No. I always chose the lizard, and I always lost. The scorpion was daisy-rigged too; it distracted the reptile with mean claws then stuck them with the flagpole stinger. One girl chided, “If you hadn’t trapped them together, lizards and scorpions would never fight.” I agreed with her.

Nowadays I rarely see anything but downed drunks and desert-dessert out here. Even when I do, my head is naked to burn, no more army hat. Still, there’s that familiar horror. It’s everywhere in Vegas—bodily fluids, confetti, meat, clothes, sun, photos, torn food, glasses, vomit, tamped dunes, smoke, torn packaging, friends, sere vegetation, shattered porcelain. Remains of a night gone wrong. The striking indifference of the desert.

A few men with chapped lips liked my figure, and I stared at their legs. They looked at my shirt sticking to my chest or at my hair curling in the heat and made sly intimations, but I just stared at their legs. Stared as if there were nothing else, no man, just calves sliced like porpoises through a propeller, toes pointed like fairy shoes, two dogs with eager snouts. They gave up eventually. Probably after telling me they had the world’s longest tongue.

This bag on the center line has a prim little knot to cloak its contents. I reach down and work it free, hand shaking. Inside, glowing in the sun, is a full angel cake in plastic armor. I smile at it for a full minute before I bring it to the curb. Yes, an untouched angel cake, forgotten, a gift from fate with no strings attached. I join in desert-dessert with the vultures—delicious. Like remains of a night gone right.

THE COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPIST WANTS A DIVORCE BUT DOES NOT WANT TO BE THE ONE TO ASK by Jo Withers

December 18, 2020

Ten months before she wants things to end, she buys two figures sculpted in soapstone, one male and one female. She positions them on the bedroom windowsill, where they will be the first thing seen each morning, the last thing seen each night. Every day she moves the figures a fraction apart. Every day she turns the male slightly into shadow, every day she moves the female closer to the light.

Eight months before she wants things to end, she redecorates, weaving bad memories throughout the apartment like mold. She scents the inside of their pillows with crumpled pine leaves to remind him of the skiing holiday where she flirted endlessly with the waiter. She covers the coffee table in the lounge room with black and white art magazines, like the ones in the waiting room at couple’s counselling. She displays erotic prints on the lounge room walls: a ballerina who looks just like her, wrapped around a dancer who looks just like his best friend.

Six months before she wants things to end, she conceals a thin wire through the lining of the sofa, from her side onto his. Every time he says something romantic, she pulls the wire a little at her end so it scratches the back of his neck, thin and pointed like a needle. ‘I missed you today,’ scratch, ‘I like your hair like that,’ scratch, ‘I love you,’ scratch.

Four months before she wants things to end, she talks to him after he falls asleep. She slips the curtain back and lets the moon inside, licking the walls like patterns on a zoetrope. She watches his eyelids dance as he grows restless, smiles as his peace of mind strains. She leans closer, feeds his subconscious with hatred. She whispers names of her past lovers, intertwines them with the names of poisonous plants and sexual positions. She tells him what she liked, what she doesn’t like with him.

Two months before she wants things to end, she chooses a symbol to mark the culmination point. She decides on a cross. She bombards him with this image at the conclusion of everything. When they finish eating, she places her knife and fork in a cross on her plate. When the T.V. show ends, she crosses her legs. When the day is over, she marks a thick black cross on the kitchen calendar. When they finish having sex, she strokes a cross against his back with her fingertips.

One month before she wants things to end, she begins to highlight words in newspapers, magazine articles, cereal boxes, instruction booklets. Words like ‘terminate’, ‘dispose’, ‘detach’.

On the day she wants things to end, she knocks the soapstone man to the floor, leaves it lying face down under the bed. She whispers belladonna and the name of her first lover over and over as he sleeps. She circles every spiteful, affecting negative that she can find—‘separate’ on the laundry powder, ‘divide’ on the cake mixture, ‘dissolve’ on the salt. She leaves him a note, ‘See you tonight’ followed by ten thick black kisses. Cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross.

When she returns from work, the house is still. She smiles at the inertia as she moves from room to room. His marks are already fading, no footprints on the sofa, no ring stains on the coffee table. His clothes have been cleared from the wardrobe; his accessories have been taken from the drawers. As she wanders through the kitchen, she ignores the water filter blinking ‘empty’, pretends she doesn’t notice the microwave label urging ‘Do not dissemble parts’. In the bedroom, evening turns the cream walls sepia, on the windowsill the soapstone woman absorbs the last light and warmth from the fading sun.

THE ROT OF THAT by Darina Sikmashvili

December 17, 2020

City women bucked when you tried to do a nice thing. To carry this or that, to open a door. To offer guidance in a terrain they weren't used to. Danny remembered telling one young woman with a gristly attitude that she shouldn't get too flustered about the noises at night. Houses out here make noise; nature is a talker. She was there to buy firewood. He was trying to do her a favor. But the girl just raked her tongue ring across her teeth and looked the other way. Danny wanted to reach into that mouth with his fingers and yank the ring right out. But he took her money, tossed the wood into the trunk of her car, and watched her get the fuck off his property.

This woman wasn’t like that. The feat to mask a certain softness immediately endeared her to him. She reminded him a little of his Josephine is why. He liked the way she studied her surroundings, his property. The way she offered, in earnest, to help wheel the wheelbarrow across the rain-silken earth. Hesitant, she asked: was the wood dry? He assured her, he wanted to. Dry as bone. It'll catch quick. Come see for yourself. Come closer. Close.

But she would not.

Josephine liked it, he thought, even under all her lecturing. Liked how ridiculous Danny found it when she'd go calling up specialists for the house’s little things. How by the time some jackass quoted her a price like he was going to drive her around in a limousine while the pipes got replaced, Danny would return with the parts to do the work himself.

This was early, when he was courting. Trying to teach this city mouse in an ugly, old, inherited house how to lean back and relax. What needed mending? She need only show him.

“Daniel,” she'd whisper.

“Danny,” he'd correct.

He rose with the sun. His hands, eager and aching to meddle, to fix. But fixing’s not what partners are for. She called him that. Partner. Like they were fixing to rob a bank.

Always a musky fear when Josephine climbed on top. She rode him and looked up, or worse, inward. He burned holes into her eyelids trying to will her out of a private celebration and back into bed with him. He felt not like her husband then but some thrill dispensary. A utility. He’d let her work herself until he swelled with wrath. Then he'd fake boredom, pluck her off, and turn her on her stomach. He’d grind to find her tool parts, isolate them, but it would come to naught. Softened by adulation, always.

Josephine left him in the winter, in the middle of the night. The inherited house was his if he wanted it. He chopped what he could into wood to sell. He chopped the trees. He torched every last living thing on that plot of land but mother nature sneered. Spring came. Shrub returned lush and grass soothed scalded earth.

But what of the rot of loneliness? What of that?

BEFORE THE FATHER/DAUGHTER JAILHOUSE DANCE by Meg Pokrass

December 14, 2020

Before seeing your daddy you wait with the other girls who have criminal daddies and you size them up. Your nose doesn't hide like theirs does, doesn’t hang down in shame. It dangles smack in the middle of your face like a lifelong promise. You’re proud of your strident, unapologetic nose, the nose you inherited from him.

"You all waitin’ to dance with your bad daddies too?" one of the droopy girls says. You aren’t interested in bonding with fools. You wonder if these girls wake up to the sight of a mother pulling crust from her eyes, saying, what the hell is this stuff that settles here? Do you think it’s made of tears?

What you’re excited about is how you'll look to your daddy, now, at this age, with women in rare supply. Girls who wait to be let inside a jail to dance in the arms of their criminal daddies should think about these things. You know that getting inside the jail and seeing your daddy will make you think about the feral cats you’ve been feeding in your car since you turned sixteen. That dancing with him will help to keep them alive.

The day your daddy left for prison he held you high up above his head and loved you like a thousand criminal daddies. Raised you to the tips of his shoulders and showed you how, exactly how, to touch the ceiling and that he wasn’t a fucking criminal, okay? That is the daddy you trust. The one you’ve been dancing with forever. You recall his sharp black stubble, his bigness. How his confidence grew against your smallness.

You can feel his fingertips spinning the dial.

Hey daddy, you say to your face in the mirror, applying lipstick, smiling like a criminal daughter. I’m stealing you back. You’ve already locked me up.

THE COUCH ATE MY MOTHER by Julia Breitkreutz

December 11, 2020

The couch unhinges its gray jaws and my mother’s unresisting body sinks into the wide gap between the soft cushions. When I first notice that the couch is eating my mother, the slight folding of her pelvis into the gray polyester fabric is so subtle of a shift that I would have easily glanced over if not for the noise—thick and wet—like leaving the YMCA as a kid. With a beach towel wrapped around my small frame, I remember how my orange Crocs quickly filled with a thin puddle of water that had dripped off my body. The sound of my skin and the chlorine water coming together in the confined space made me laugh as I walked with my mother—hand in hand—across the hot pavement towards our van. A squelching sound.

The couch’s black, slimy tongue has revealed itself and is wrapping around my mother’s thin, unshaven calves. It releases this thick gray goo across her wasted body, like the glistening trails slugs leave behind on our driveway. I grab and pull my mother’s arm—we all do—but the action only seems to increase the rate at which the couch devours her.

There are the pills—yellow and white and some pink—that Doctor Gordon tells us we must give her three times a day. Dr. Gordon has a thick belly upon which he folds his wide hands when we tell him that the pills aren’t working, that our mother is still being eaten. He is already scribbling a prescription for more pills as we speak.

I wonder what color they will be this time. What shape.

I hold my mother’s head up and away from the floral-patterned pillow and notice the indentation her head has made in the fabric. I press the glass to her thin, chapping lips. As the orange juice drains from the glass, I find myself wondering exactly how long it takes for the colorful pills to exert their power after dissolving within a body.

Soon all that is left of my mother’s body is her head and neck. We take turns spoon-feeding her vanilla yogurt mixed in with strawberries for breakfast and warmed-up beef stew for dinner. I fill up a red bowl with warm water and massage shampoo into her hair, cupping the water in my hand and rinsing away the suds as she sinks a little deeper, the end of her chin now hidden.

There is a moment in which I think I notice a flicker in her eye. For an instant, I convince myself that she is actually looking at me as if she suddenly remembers that I am her daughter and she is my mother. Just as quickly as it is there, it disappears and the couch makes a slurping noise, taking a few centimeters more of her into that space which we cannot reach.

ROLLING by H. A. Eugene

December 9, 2020

The day came when he didn’t know what else he could possibly do, so he climbed up a great hill and lied down on top of it. And then he started rolling.

He accelerated, faster and faster, and after a few exhilarating bangs and bumps, found himself, once again, at the bottom. But he didn’t stop there. He kept on rolling—through the woods and into town. Eventually he rolled into the city, underneath the highway that bisected its sprawling map, past the train tracks, and beyond the outlet stores that marked the suburb’s edge.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Until houses changed to warehouses, and warehouses changed to land with unshaven grass and ravenous trees that crawled over rocks and monopolized the dirt; until that dirt turned to rock, and that rock, a chalk-like substance that ended at a cliff whose edge dropped into a churning, interminable darkness.

The sea.

And with no regard for what lay ahead, he plunged right off that edge—and splashed directly into the foaming brine. But this didn’t stop his motion, no. Instead, he continued rolling—underwater. On the sea floor, over massive dead reefs, and beyond the Continental Shelf, then down into the Mariana Trench, where water flows beneath the water.

And even in this lightless submarine plain of great pressure and gurning silence, he kept on rolling.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

By this point, it was as if motion had become a type of stillness, and stillness, motion; a convolution of senses, all but ignored by his ceaselessly spinning purview.

Like those numerous wrecks—missing machines, long since abandoned and so time-worn, they appeared ancient.

And those ruins—so eroded, they appeared constructed by time and chance, and not by people.

And those bizarre entities—yes, there were creatures down there! But as organisms go, they were barely alive, in the sense that he understood ‘alive’ to be. And the exact shapes of their oblique bodies—to say nothing of how they lived at all, this far down—would never be known by him. Because—like the wrecks, the ruins, and every other mystery that whirled by—they appeared only as colorful slivers of light, beheld for barely a stroboscopic moment; far too quick to ever be properly defined, or explained. Because he was rolling.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

And he kept on rolling, even when the waters became still, and the air rejoined the surface, where birds made feasts of dead things in the briny surf.

Mind you, by this point, he, himself, was dead; though that hardly mattered. His lack of life did nothing to stop his rolling; though eventually, his body did fall apart, smallest bits, first. Fingernails, then fingers. Then hands. Then arms. And those biggest chunks of him dissolved into bone and mush; then sand, until that sand broke up into the smallest possible units of matter; mindless doo-dads that kept on and on and on; compelled by heat and cold, to a state of endless, un-feeling motion.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

REST STOPS AND PARKING LOTS by Aaron Burch

December 7, 2020

Because I didn’t want to pay for a hotel. Because I could afford to pay for a hotel, but it seemed like a waste. Because, as much as I enjoy sleeping in and then being lazy and watching TV in bed, I wanted to get up and moving and on the road as soon as possible. Because I’d paid for and slept in a hotel the night before, and I’d do so again the night after, and I thought a night in my car would both save me a little money and make me appreciate the nights when I did get a hotel.

AT THE POLICE STATION, WITH SKETCH ARTIST by Alana Mohamed

December 4, 2020

The most startling thing about him was the realization that he must have been beautiful when he was younger. I like to look into people’s faces and imagine them other ways: older, younger, dying, terrified, on the brink of extreme cruelty. This man did not look capable of cruelty, though it was dark out and difficult to tell. He seemed like a good man who had grown up and seen life turn in on itself and now he was in a hard way, with such a striking face and such deep lines.It was a foggy Tuesday and I was exhausted from a hike through four supermarkets to find limes. It was unusual of me to be out so late at night and to stare so brazenly at a man. I’m embarrassed about it now.He carried stress in his brow, I remember. It furrowed when I didn’t immediately comply. I couldn’t hear him at first. He was a frantic whisperer and I was at a loss to make him stop. He got close enough to reach for my bag, a vintage store relic I bought to be interesting, and I finally understood. I imagined his whole face smoothing out at the sight of hungry children or a pregnant wife, and I decided to give him everything. I shoved my bag in his hands along with: my wallet, $73 in cash, and two credit cards I never use; the keys to my apartment; a small can of pepper spray; three overnight pads I carried “just in case;” a water bottle with no water; half a package of Tums; the three limes I had finally claimed. “For gimlets,” I explained when he looked up.“Funny lady,” he whispered. He thought I was joking. I liked that.He didn’t like it when I took off my blouse. Instead, with alarm: “Look funny lady, I don’t want any trouble.” I told him I wasn’t trying to give him any trouble, just the clothes off my back. “That always spells trouble,” he said, shaking his head. It’s true, I carry some baggage from past relationships, but he didn’t have to assume it was like that.I said, “You’re being very rude and I didn’t take you for a rude guy.”His eyes widened—they had been narrowed the whole time and I’d assumed he had a natural Clint Eastwood squint, but when he looked at me, years melted off his face. I could see that underneath he was like a Disney Prince, handsome and prone to severe errors in judgment. “I don’t think you’re a rude guy,” I amended quickly.“I’m not a rude guy, I’m a stranger trying to rob you,” he reminded me gently. He stood there with my purse, I with my shirt off. “I just wanted to give you something. This is a very nice blouse.” It was white silk with puffed sleeves, my mother’s from her secretary days. I thought it would suit his color, or maybe he’d enjoy it brushing against his skin the way I had as a child.The creased brow deepened. “I don’t want you to give me anything, I need to take something from you,” he said. I couldn’t imagine caring about the difference between the two.“I thought what you needed was help,” I told him.“I think you need help.” He said, reaching out with his hands. I looked at his peeling fingers and thought, “Yes, I do.” I opened my arms wide, he hooked the purse strap on my outstretched hand.“No, no, I insist,” I tried to return the stinging rejection, but he was already backing away. I shrugged my top on intending to follow him. When I looked up he was gone and I was lost in the fog. I keep failing to recall his face, though I can’t stop thinking about it: old and wrinkled, young and wide-eyed at the same time. Instead, I can only see it buried in the puffed sleeve of my mother’s favorite blouse, a phantom that will not shake loose. Surely this is some kind of crime.

SHOSTAKOVICH’S THIRD FUGUE by Derick Dupre

December 2, 2020

Dmitri finds himself on a deep south farmhouse tour. He’s not sure of how events have contrived to bring him there. The last thing he remembers is packing a bag, he was folding clothes and packing them, though he’d be at a loss to say where he was originally going or why. Outside the heat is murderous. While walking down a wide hall behind an oblivious but garrulous guide, Dmitri’s distracted by the virtuosity inherent in the hand that made a certain crown moulding, stops to admire it, fails to take his meds as he should every day at this time, and has an episode. He denounces Stalin, Jefferson Davis, and the mother of Jefferson Davis. He is incoherent and has to be restrained. In the ambulance he wets himself. Following a brief chat with a state psychiatrist, he receives a new prescription and is discharged. Once outside, he throws away the prescription, which the lady at the discharge desk pronounced per-skip-shin, and begins a slow walk to nowhere.

Dmitri is now at a Bob Seger show. Again with the uncertainty of being present at this kind of spectacle, but fuck it, it’s Seger, a musician of the people much like himself. After a few of the hits, he panics and flees the arena, perhaps due to the hostile nature of certain members of the Bullet Club, some of whom had arrived in a busted maroon Blazer with a vanity plate that read NITEMOVZ and were more than a little pushy. He’s picked up rambling in the parking lot and is admitted for the second time during his vacation. Being a generally nonviolent, humanity-loving kind of person, he’s released on a promise to stick with his regimen.

Following an interval of unknown measure, Dmitri awakes to the shock of cold water all around him. He’s chained himself to his rental bicycle and has ridden it into the river. As the bicycle’s frame is of an intermediate strength aluminum alloy, it doesn’t really sink the way a desperate type like Dmitri hopes it would sink. He flails among the seethe and gleam of passing ships that stalk through like bright white skyscrapers. He finds his way out, bicycle in tow, and collapses on the shoal.

He hasn’t been the same since his official denunciation, which sort of marked the beginning of this vacation, but he wants you to know that he’s here voluntarily, that he wasn’t dragged here by the authorities, he walked in here after drying off and losing the bicycle.

Here is a double-wide that the state calls an extension of the hospital. An annex of misery and Xanax.

After a few hours he’s familiar with his surroundings. He grabs a handful of riffled and soiled magazines from a small table and shuffles back to the bed, where he applies various fragrance samples to his wrists. He’s pissed because he doesn’t have his composition book nor his teddybear. “I’m righteously indignant and I deserve to be,” he says, rubbing a magazine on his arm.

Arms akimbo now, hands groping the flesh around his hips, muttering: “Doesn’t matter anymore, you made a horrible mistake. I made a mistake before I even knew what it was, okay? Rice-a-roni. That’s what was left of her leaving. I’m back. I have a son. All I know right now is, Al? I would certainly hope so. Get the fuck out of here. One two three really doesn’t work. Black rainbow phoenix.” He stops abruptly as his meandering jowls settle on a rice krispie treat.

He pads over to the sink and picks up a can of deodorant and begins to spray his underarms, a crystal mist clouding around him, the scent meant to approximate a fine shore breeze, aerosol misting through his spunlace shirt and clouding around him so that he appears to be a figure removed from some faraway moor, the can whistling until it’s empty and the entire room smells like a chemist’s idea of sunset on the beach. He sits on the bed.

“Topamax is what had me in the bed when I couldn’t get out the bed. I don’t know how to prove I’m not crazy. I been taking the goddamn shit they been giving me. I wasn’t acting manic, I was proving a point with the animal police. I’m even off food stamps, I’m copping food stamps from Sergei. I should go to film school. I know how to operate that equipment, I did that shit in high school. I happen to be very talented at film production. In the past two and a half years I can count on one hand the days I haven’t been locked up, creatively speaking. I can blame that on Andrei and on my denunciation. He started playing with cocaine. Feels like I got the whole world against me. But the world’s against everybody. It’s up to me to make it better for myself.”

The doctor nods rhythmically and turns up his hearing aid. “You’ll have to speak up, Dmitri. I didn’t get any of that. Did you mention a history of cocaine abuse, or something about when you first realized that you were Jesus Christ?”

The deaf doctor in a multicolor striped lamé shirt, black slacks and shoes, and beechwood cane whose handle is a sterling silver clenched fist and whose ferrule holds a needle containing an exquisite cocktail, a B-52, a mixture of Haldol, Ativan, and Benadryl intended for the rowdier customers. Dr. Halberd has only used this once, on a customer who had a history of practicing martial arts.

Dmitri jumps to his feet and says, “You don’t know a thing about me, and although I’m willing to play along, it seems you did not read the advance literature about me, you who compulsively laugh when you don’t understand, which makes me think there’s something now a little delusional about this whole thing, like when my holiday place setting is next to a relative my family is ashamed of. The whole time I’m glad that my blood is different, is the iron-rich coagulate I know it to be.”

Meanwhile Dr. Halberd is still nodding like a drinking bird, worrying a spot on the heel of the silver fist, drifting, and begins to analyze his own problems. He wonders if he’s fucked up anybody’s life, if he’s the one somebody blames their moods on, their anhedonic routines, their mistrust of strangers, their pessimism regarding romance. I don’t think I’ve fucked anyone up like that, but it’d be a sort of perverse honor if I did, he reasons to himself. Maybe a customer or a few of the nurses. He thinks about it and taps his cane twice on the floor, says, “Good, all very good, we’re just going to keep you here and monitor your progress. There’s rice krispie treats on the table.”

Dmitri, defeated, sinks back onto the bed and watches Dr. Halberd’s image recede from the room in the small mirror above the sink. He decides that he can safely say this is the worst vacation ever. Hands laced behind his head, he looks out the window at a distant office tower and hears a voice in his head, it’s Bob Seger’s voice, whispering:

“If I ever get out of here, I’m going to Katmandu.”

This piece originally appeared in Neutrons/Protons in 2014.

RESTORATION by Myna Chang

November 30, 2020

Nobody tells her how to remove her father’s blood, how to cleanse the pools and spatters of a life stolen.

The county sheriff doesn’t warn her about the stickiness, or how very much of it there is, puddled on the floor between the cash register and the chicken feed. He doesn’t tell her about the crust that will form if she puts off cleaning until the day after the funeral.

No one helps her call the professional crime scene cleaners in the city. Their phonebook advertisement mentions special equipment and emotional distance. They promise ‘restoration’ — but she is outside their service area.

Her friends can’t anticipate that the smell will be the thing that finally pushes her over. They don’t reassure her it’s okay to retch; her father surely understands, he never would have wanted this grisly, intimate task to fall to her.

She doesn’t yet realize that, for the rest of her life, she will choke at the drip of spilled coffee, or spasm breathless when she glimpses a puddle of rain.

Right now, she only wants someone to tell her how much bleach she will need.