And the melon sound might have been preferable, though gorier, because what if the gonging meant that the man’s head was preternaturally hard, that the shovel had met its match? Once when she had flipped a turtle and scooped it up, instead of retracting into its shell, it lolled its head out toward her, upside down, opening and closing its beak fitfully. When she set it in the tall grass and flipped it right-side up, its feet came out lightning fast and it turned on the shovel. For an instant, she had felt the mighty turtle’s strength and rage right through the titanium and the wood handle. It had shaken the shovel like a terrier would shake a knotted sock before continuing on its prehistoric way, the tall grass shivering in its wake.

The man, the stranger who had her blood on his hands, who was still holding the square of cheese between his thumb and forefinger, didn’t fly sideways to accommodate the spade thudding into his temple; that was what she’d half expected, him flying sideways into the cereal and wineglass cupboard, but her experience with this sort of thing heretofore was from cartoons. None of these specific thoughts were going through her mind, of course; they were more like synaptic realizations, pulses of understanding, except that understanding implies process. There was no process, no hesitation, because she was operating like a simple organism in that moment, one that was programmed to survive, like a sperm or a hammerhead shark.

She had lived on a lake when she first came to New York, after Iowa and her divorce, before she met her new husband and moved into his sprawling farmhouse. Her rented place, the upper half of a duplex, had been set into the side of a hill and surrounded by tall reaching trees, elms and oaks and the like, creating a fringed green awning that cast everything into a perpetual dense shade. Every morning she woke to the sound of Round Lake slapping the legs of the dock down below; it was like cold astringent in the face, the loneliness of that sound after her busy chattering life in Iowa. Nothing to keep her company but her own self and the soothing, flapping-moth feeling inside her skull that she registered not as depression or anxiety but as a balance of both states—a kind of stasis that led to endless hours of sitting at a desk or standing on the varnished porch, staring down at the mossy path and the wavering blue lake.