Aunt Lydia pressed her hand over her mouth of a dead rodent. After a minute she took her hand away. I wanted to cry too because she reminded me. If only she wouldn’t eat half of them first, I said to Luke.

Don’t think it’s easy for me either, said Aunt Lydia.

MOIRA, BREEZING INTO my room, dropping her denim jacket on the floor. Got any cigs, she said.

In my purse, I said. No matches though.

Moira rummages in my purse. You should throw out some of this junk, she says. I’m giving an underwhore party.

A what? I say. There’s no point trying to work, Moira won’t allow it, she’s like a cat that crawls onto the page when you’re trying to read.

You know, like Tupperware, only with underwear. Tarts’ stuff. Lace crotches, snap garters. Bras that push your tits up. She finds my lighter, lights the cigarette she’s extracted from my purse. Want one? Tosses the package, with great generosity considering they’re mine.

Thanks piles, I say sourly. You’re crazy. Where’d you get an idea like that?

Working my way through college, says Moira. I’ve got connections. Friend of my mother’s. It’s big in the suburbs, once they start getting age spots they figure they’ve got to beat the competition. The Pornomarts and what have you.

I’m laughing. She always made me laugh.

But here? I say. Who’ll come? Who needs it?

You’re never too young to learn, she says. Come on, it’ll be great. We’ll all pee our pants laughing.

IS THAT HOW we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.

We lived in the gaps between the stories.