The top of the refrigerator has been in my peripheral vision for weeks now. Not the side of it, which is nothing, a flat white wall I have no interest in, but the top, which I can only ever see from an angle, from the floor, looking up past the cabinets. There is a wicker … Read more
There were four extra shoes by the door before I even understood what was happening, and that should tell you everything about how prepared I was for this evening. Four shoes means two people, and two people is not nothing. One person arriving is an event. Two people arriving at once, within minutes of each … Read more
She moved the coffee table today. Not far — maybe two feet, enough to clear a rectangle of open floor in the living room — but far enough that it now sits half over the vent, which I consider a separate offense entirely and plan to address later. First things first. I needed to understand … Read more
She brought out a flat cardboard box this afternoon, the kind that arrives folded nearly to nothing and has to be coaxed back into a shape with your thumbs along the seams. I watched her do this from the hallway with some suspicion, because boxes in this house have a way of either containing something … Read more
Something happened to the window in the night and I would like it on record that I noticed immediately. Before she was even properly awake. Before the coffee. I was the first one in the house to understand that the glass had changed. It wasn’t broken, exactly. I want to be precise about this because … Read more
It started with one knock. A single, deliberate sound, metal on metal, from inside the radiator in the back room — not the window, not the wall, the radiator itself, as if something had reached up from underneath the floor and rapped its knuckles against the pipe to get my attention. I was sitting nowhere … Read more
There is a flat plastic container that lives under the bed, in the dead zone past where my paw can reach without real commitment, and until this afternoon I had made my peace with not knowing exactly what was in it. I assumed dust. I assumed the particular nothing that collects in places nobody goes. … Read more
She fell asleep on the couch today in a way I don’t think she meant to. One minute she was sitting up with her knees tucked under her, watching something on the flat bright screen with the sound down low, and the next her head had drifted sideways against the cushion and her mouth had … Read more
I was asleep against her side, which is where I am most nights now, when the wall above the dresser lit up and something long and pale slid across it sideways, stretched itself tall against the corner, and then was gone before I had even finished sitting up. I want to be fair to myself … Read more
There is an order to things when she comes home. I did not invent this order, I only noticed it, the way a scholar notices a pattern in old texts nobody else bothered to read closely. Keys first, into the dish by the door, a small metallic clatter that means she has stopped moving forward … Read more
