‘Fucker,’ she said.

‘I think we should go picking,’ said Red. He’d come out on to the porch, where Anouk now sat with a bowl of yoghurt topped with discs of banana and a cowlick of peanut butter.

‘Now?’

‘Just up the road.’ He wore his Jays cap and his glasses, the broken ones. They hung crooked and to the left.

‘I left your spare glasses out,’ she said.

‘Don’t like those ones.’ With one finger he tried to straighten the glasses, but they slid back to crook. He swung an empty ice cream container from its plastic handle. ‘Don’t bother with your shoes,’ he said.

She looked down to his bare, fish-belly-white feet, his hairy toes.

This was how they picked berries in the woods when Anouk was little, feet bare to the ground, stabbed by sharp pebbles and stuck by old coniferous needles, but cushioned by them too. The dread of thorns and acorn caps, nettles and goose shit. The mash of slugs or the stubbing of toes on exposed roots. But there was also cool mud between the toes and the gratification of the earth, the dirt, the rock, right up there in the bridge of the foot. It left the soles of the feet tingling with pain, but also scraped clean and raw and good.

The wild raspberries that grew along the side of the trail were no bigger than garden peas. Anouk and Red worked beside each other, hunched over the berries, which were abundant, causing the pickers’ progression along the trail to be slow. The raspberries were abundant and the pickers’ progression along the trail was slow. Each time Anouk filled her palm she rolled the berries into Red’s bucket, gently so they wouldn’t bruise, and they carried on this way in silence until the bucket was full. It was shady along the side of the road and a little cool, and Anouk wanted to go back to the house. She watched a corn-yellow butterfly land on a waxy chokecherry leaf, alight, circle, land. Alight again. A honey bee, its leg panniers packed with bright pollen, honed in on a violet honeysuckle horn, nestled, sucked, detached and bumped along to the next blossom. She wanted to go back. Something was happening, but she didn’t yet know what it was and she didn’t want to know. A ladybug left a thick trail of dark-orange shit on a fern plume.

‘Where have you gone?’ Red asked. He stood in the middle of the road, where sunlight pooled. His grip on the bucket handle was tight, and the bucket was so full that tiny raspberries tumbled over the sides like passengers abandoning a sinking ship. ‘You look lost.’

Anouk shrugged.

‘That was great, your story, you know. I can’t even tell you, how great it is.’ He tapped his hand to his heart. ‘You need to start the next one.’

‘I know.’

Red tilted his face to the sky. More berries fell from the bucket and bumped along the ground. A procession of tiny, decapitated heads.