Agnes left the red bowl for me in the morning, so I woke lying beside the poisonous mushrooms. I buried them without being asked. Maybe I dug the hole shallower than the others, imagining that I would have cause to dig them up. Maybe I patted the dirt over them softly, lightly, with my own two hands. You cannot blame me for hoping.

I still had, also, that small, sharp knife. I could hold him down and turn it around the sole of his foot, peeling and peeling the skin away. Did he really splinter bone, was infection festering there, what was the secret injury down at the heart of him? There are only simple answers to a knife.

But I imagined Agnes’s face. I let the knife be.

When I came into the house, he was eating her mushrooms.

It was the plate I had made before we fought. Swiss brown mushrooms with pasta. Garlic, cheese, onion, butter, the heat of the stove on the undersides of my wrist, and the face Agnes always made when she put the first bite of my food into her mouth, which said that I cared for her so well.

The mushrooms, which had grown in a small grove at the back of her neck, like miniature trees. I had bent my mouth to one, and sucked it.

Arthur held a square of mushroom on his fork. The fat dripped onto the plate. When he saw me, he lifted his fork, in a cheers gesture. The slick body of the mushroom caught the light, and then he closed his mouth around it.

I could hear him bite from across the room.

“You can’t.” My voice sounded sharp and lonely, a crow shrieking its rage outside. “You can’t have that.”

“Why not?”

When Agnes came into the room, I can imagine what she saw on my face. What I saw on hers was nothing, the flat capstone sliding into place in a wall. When ancient builders built houses, did you know they would bury a man alive beneath them? To ensure the stability of the house.

“You can’t have that,” I said again, thinking that she had said she loved me, that anger did not kill love, or that, if it did, it killed it like amatoxin. Over a long period, with several lapses and relapses. This is just for us, Agnes had said, had agreed, had upheld. This is just for us.

“Geb.” The flat line of Agnes’s mouth fell on me like a floorboard. “Geb, stop it.”

And Arthur took another bite.

* * *

Even inside loss, or the curled serpent of its potential, things have to fill the day.

I cleaned, I made no food. I paced circles in the garden. I took my bike to the road and did not ride it anywhere.

There was one beautiful place. Our small stone house, and the two of us inside it.

Inside, Agnes sat next to Arthur on our couch. She smiled at him, and maintained that careful foot of distance.