“Sure.” This is their preferred route home. They weave their way past the shuttered-up fronts of the African hairdressers, past sliding piles of cardboard boxes, crates of too-ripe mangoes buzzing with flies. The blood-metal stink of the butchers’ shops.

Halfway down the street a bar is open and a bunch of young people stand outside, drinking colorful cocktails with retro umbrellas. There is a rackety, demob air to the throng; some of them still wearing sunglasses in the dusky light. At the sight of them Lissa hangs back, tugging on Hannah’s arm. “Come on—we could just have a little drink?”

But Hannah is suddenly tired—irritated by these young people laughing into the weekday night, by Lissa’s spaciousness. What does she have to get up for in the morning? By her constant capacity for forgetting that lately Hannah does not drink.

“You go. I’ve got to be in early. I’ve got a report due. I think I’ll get the bus.”

“Oh, OK.” Lissa turns back. “I guess I’ll walk. It’s such a lovely evening. Hey”—she brings her hands to Hannah’s face—“good luck.”

Cate

SOMEONE IS CALLING HER. SHE FOLLOWS THE VOICE BUT IT twists and echoes and will not be caught. She struggles upwards, breaks the surface, understands—it is her son crying, lying beside her in the bed. She brings him to her breast and gropes for her phone. The screen reads 3:13—less than an hour since his last waking.

She had been dreaming again: the nightmare; broken streets, rubble, and her with Tom in her arms, wandering, searching the burned-out carcasses of buildings for something, for someone—but she did not recognize the streets, or the city, did not know where she was, and everything was over, everything destroyed.

Tom feeds, his grip slowly slackening, and she listens for the change in his breathing that signals the beginning of sleep. Then, with the barest of movements, she slides her nipple from his mouth, her arm from above him, turns onto her side and pulls the covers up over her ear. And she is falling, falling down into the pit of sleep and the sleep is water—but he is crying again, escalating now, announcing his distress, his indignation that she should fall like this away from him, and she hauls herself back awake.

Her tiny son is writhing beneath her in the gritty light. She lifts him and rubs his back. He gives a small belch and she puts him back on the breast, closing her eyes as he suckles and then bites. She cries out in pain and rolls away.

“What? What is it?” She pushes her fists into her eyes as Tom wails, hands and legs flailing, fists closing on nothing. “Stop it, Tom. Please, please.”