Somewhere, crickets are chirping. Tumbleweeds are tumbling. Between Miriam and Harriet sits a giant gulf, a wide open space occupied by a howling wind and not much more.

As a delaying tactic, this does Miriam little good.

"That's it?" Miriam says.

Harriet seems confused. "What do you mean?"

"That's not a story. That's the end of a story."

"It suits me fine."

"I just figure," Miriam says, "that there's more to this tale. You don't just one day up and chop up your husband and stuff him down the – garbage disposal? Really?"

"It's doable," Harriet says without inflection. "Not the bones. But the rest."

"Your husband."

"My husband."

Once more, silence. The house around them settles: creaking, squeaking, a quiet cracking like the sound of a spoon hitting the burnt sugar crust of crème brûlée.

"I just – I just feel like a story is hiding in there somewhere."

Harriet steps up over the tub's lip and elbows Miriam in the face. In the jaw, actually. Miriam sees a burst of white light followed by a sucking vortex of outer space, like a black hole coming for her on a galloping horse. Once more, she tastes blood. Her tongue idly searches out a wiggly tooth toward the back of her mouth.

Miriam turns her head and spits scarlet sputum against the faded tile. Spat. She thinks first about hawking it into Harriet's eye, but at this point, she can't imagine that would be productive. Maybe later.

"Oooo-kay," Miriam says, already feeling her lip going fat and numb, "so you just one day up and decided to hack up your husband and shove him into the garbage disposal."

"It was deserved, if that's what you're asking."

"It's not. But it sounds like, contrary to what you were suggesting earlier, there's more to the story." Miriam blinks. "I think I'm drooling blood."

"You are."

"Oh. Good to know."

Harriet's cell phone vibrates. She opens it, looks at the screen so that Miriam cannot see. Her face shows no emotion, but she does pause and seem to consider.

Then, finally, Harriet shrugs and tells her story in full.

INTERLUDE

Harriet's Story,

This Time With Feeling

Walter never made sense to me.

I married him because it's what you did. It's what my mother did. My grandmother. It's what all the girls in my neighborhood did. They found men, and they supported those men through thick and thin. In my life, women were crutches. Stepping stools. Vacuum cleaners with breasts.

My husband never had any sense of elegance, no grasp of sequence or consequence.

When a storm rides up the coast, it leaves debris. Loose boards, paper cups, flotsam, jetsam. Nothing but discards and broken things.

That was Walter. He'd come home from work – sales manager at a pigment plant, where they sold dyes and pigments to cosmetic manufacturers, mostly – and his process was a casting off, a dismissal of the order I'd created.

That's what I remember most about Walter. The signs of his passing.