Agnes let me trim the mushrooms again on the third day, because their small knots were already showing through the cotton of her long sleeves. I roused her in the dark of the morning with my hand on her side. I got the bowls from the kitchen cabinet, and my paring knife, going softly past Arthur on the pads of my feet. Agnes lolled in her pink cotton romper. She hummed to herself with her voice still sleep-gummy. “Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter. Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down.”

I undid the buttons on her chest, and knelt between her spread thighs. She smiled down at me, and I slid the jumper off her shoulders. The grooves of the hardwood pressing into the thin skin of my knees.

Agnes laid her hand on my shoulder. The corners of her mouth turned up. “Well, my goodness gracious,” she sang, “let me tell you the news. My head’s been wet with the midnight dew. I’ve been down on bended knee, talking to the man from Galilee.”

“You’re like an old man.” I made my back a bow curve, arched my neck up to kiss her. Some things are just so lovely. She rolled my bottom lip between her teeth and then bit. “I need to take your underwear off,” and she stood half up to let me. There was the comfort of a still, empty room, the light between us, the dark outside. Have you noticed that, how when you turn the lights on in your house at night, space decreases to the size of the room you’re in? It becomes the only room in the world.

“There’s a horn of plenty growing from your back,” I told her, and then licked into the black velvet trumpet of its mouth. I cut it away. I shaved mushrooms from her shoulders. I untangled them from the slick curtain of her hair. I trimmed an ivory funnel quick and easy from her thigh.

“As sure as God made black and white,” Agnes sang, “what is done in the dark will be brought to the light.”

“Do you think he’s really injured?” I sliced the velvet pioppini from her ankle.

“You saw his blood. You bandaged him.”

“Do you think he’s as injured as he says he is?”

Agnes shook her head. “I don’t think you should assume people are lying.”

“Have you left him alone in the house at all?”

“Why?”

I stopped, with the knife above the oyster mushrooms on her shoulder. “Because I don’t want him going through our things.”

“I don’t think—”

“Your office door doesn’t lock.”