This is not the first time something like the mallard dream has happened, but Alice does not know this. It happened once before, when Elliot was only a boy. He’d been taking a nap with his cousin, Olivia, on their grandmother’s living room floor. He remembers the green shag carpet and his grandmother’s shih tzu, Dolly, sniffing the perimeter of where he and Olivia lay belly-up on an old down comforter. His mother had turned out the lights and forced the adults from the living room so the children could rest. They had to sleep in the living room because Elliot was frightened of the bedrooms. His father had died in one of them when Elliot was only a baby—which room, he was never told, but he knew it had happened in this house, in one of the beds, while his father was sleeping. And so it was on the floor of his grandmother’s living room that Elliot had woken to find that he was pummeling Olivia’s face with the palms of his hands. The adults had come in screaming—they pulled him off his cousin and made him sit alone in the master bedroom, perhaps the most haunted of all the rooms. Alone, he was forced to recall the dream. There had been a man sitting on his chest, his head bloated to the size of a pumpkin. The man had a skinny white tongue that he kept running across his lips, as if he were thirsty. He was wearing the same plaid button-down Elliot’s father wore in the picture his mother kept above the fireplace.

And now there was this, the mallard. How could he ever trust himself again? He wonders what else he might do in his sleep, what other crimes he might commit. Of course, Alice must be thinking the same thing. And so he is not entirely surprised when she does not come home that day, or the next. She does not answer his calls. Desperate, he calls her sister, who picks up and says, “Hello?” only to then hang up when a male voice in the background shouts, “She explicitly told us not to talk to him, Marta. Can’t you do anything right?”

He has loved Alice thoroughly since he met her, and the idea of living without her is almost too difficult a thought to bear. Outside of this, her absence also poses several logistical problems. The most immediate of these is Thanksgiving with his parents. The second is how he will pay rent, which is affordable if split between the two of them but which will drain him if he has to carry the burden alone.

And so he goes to the only place he thinks she could be hiding.

Alice’s ex-girlfriend’s name is Ramona, and she is the kind of woman who makes Elliot want to join a gym. She is not a beautiful woman— her face is acne scarred and dominated by a large, crooked nose—but she danced for the Kansas City ballet before settling into a career as a physical therapist. When she answers the door, she does so wearing sweatpants rolled down to reveal the blades of her hipbones. There in the background, sitting on the couch in her favorite pair of flannel pajamas, is Alice. Her hair is done up in a messy ponytail and she is wearing her glasses, the ones he spent hours helping her pick out at the optometrist’s office. She’d been a pain that day, making absurd claims about her appearance. My face is too small. I just don’t have the same eyebrows I used to.