“Can’t you be quiet about it? Oh, if it means so much to you, fine, I’ll take the dumb keys! I won’t use them, though.”

“Heh! Y’ will! Yull see—th’ cabin’s jes’ grand, an’ th’ shack’s a fine place fer dressin’ up. They’re both fine spots,” he repeated vaguely.

Holding the keys, Frances stepped backward, bumping into a mop upended against the kitchen wall. Slowly, as if with the slowness of the town itself, the mop fell toward her, toward the floor, while Mal stood by, she noted, now with a peaceful expression on his face. Finally, the mop struck a tower of empty boxes that crashed down, racing across the floor. Frances ran from the kitchen.

* * *

The screen door made of soft, dirtied aluminum—into which were pressed images of herons and dozens of smaller birds—gave easily beneath Frances’ touch. A slight kick or strike behind the door might distort the bird shapes, and already had, she noted. Yellowish light from the porch’s bulb slicked the windows, the wooden stair and a portion of the grass; beyond, inky, intractable night saturated the street. As Munson’s council had never much cared for erecting street-lamps, the town was known for its nights of profound, mineral darkness. Some quality in the darkness always led Frances—and most townsfolk—into a near-helpless, paralytic grogginess each evening after supper, a sleepiness that was delicious in one way, yet also unpleasant because of its power. The grogginess led to ferociously deep sleep for most, though for Frances, the relief of sleep was more elusive.

At the same time sleep brought rest, it brought the possibility of predation, she knew. For that reason, Frances often struggled against her evening grogginess, even though she desired sleep. In the end, she took the pills to help.

She leaned now against the porch beam, blinking, a soft expression on her face. The cool air was loaded with fog droplets. Frances’ eyes settled on some small, calcareous-looking objects in the dark yard: a hose, an empty flower-pot she employed as a spade, a dwarf tree with its surrounding fallen fruit. Frances wondered if her Munson ancestors had known the same irresistible sleepiness, and if they, like she, struggled with it over the years. In the distance she made out the window of the local hair salon, and beyond that, the hunkered-down shape of the high school gym.

A number of birds or bats swept past her face with astonishing speed, landing beneath the eaves. Frances felt alone. She pressed a dense, ferrous taste from her tongue, glancing at the porch swing, then at her fingers, recalling an evening much like this one when, as a teen, solitary as now, she had rubbed her palms down her hips as if to prime herself for the future, believing her life would embody, beginning that moment, a single, understandable story. But this idea had been wrong. “I have no frame,” she spoke loudly to no one in the tranquilizing dark, thinking how, tonight, she would flip her body to one side of the bed, then the other, until she dropped to sleep from exhaustion or pills. Frances suspected that she even fought herself physically during sleep, but she was not sure. In brief, slashing glimpses, she recalled sensations of nighttime fury.