After the bus came and the children waved goodbye to her, Karen stood on the walk for a long time. She looked around her neighborhood. The houses had been strung with strands of twinkle lights over the weekend—the only thing blooming in the snow. If she walked for fifteen minutes in a straight line to the north she would be in the woods. But she didn’t move. She took out a cigarette and perched the filter between her dry lips. When she exhaled her breath came out in a thick fog from the cold.

When I reached the last word I looked up. All those strange faces were staring in a manner that completely unnerved me. They looked confused more than anything. Then they suddenly began to clap. I had no concept of how well or awful I’d read, had no concept of how the writing had been received. I folded the papers and returned to my seat to find Lonnie gone. Though I suspected her absence was because William had woken and she hadn’t wanted to disrupt the reading, it still made me anxious.

I sat through another writer and then a slideshow of artwork, not paying any attention, before we were all finally released to get more wine and partake of the appetizers coming out of the kitchen. I stood, intending to leave immediately to find Lonnie, to ask her if she’d caught any part of my performance, but was instead surrounded by a throng of people.

They complimented my work. They wanted to know when the book was coming out. They wanted to know what it was about, how far along I was, if I knew so-and-so or had read such-and-such. They wanted to know where I had gone to school and whose classes I’d taken. One woman wanted to know where I’d bought my dress. I gave them half-hearted answers, a mixture between complete ignorance and blatant lies, then emerged onto the patio, my legs still shaky from the alcohol, weak from not having eaten. Someone handed me a cigarette. They were all smoking, so I was smoking too. I hadn’t smoked in a long time, and I struggled to remember what I was doing, how often to tap off the ashes, where to put my hand to avoid catching myself on fire. It seemed like a dangerous thing to be holding with that amount of alcohol inside me.