“I’m going to make dinner tonight,” she said, “and until he leaves. I don’t want you preparing any food,” and she shook her head at me, slowly, the way that one looks at a dying animal. I found a deer corpse one day, while hiking through the woods, that was dissolving under the worms, the fungi, the beaks of the crows. The pale antlers lying against the earth. One of its eyes was still partially intact, with the socket just beginning to pull away, and a sheen of once-white liquid. Do you imagine expressions on the faces of corpses? It looked desperate. “Not his,” Agnes said, “and not mine.”

* * *

I slept in the backyard that night, and not much at all. I looked at the clusters of the stars, watched a spider stringing up webbing in our rosebush. Perhaps it was not necessary for me to go back at all. The cottage might close itself, become the perfect yellow shape of an egg containing only Agnes and Arthur, and his large hand with its chapped knuckles smoothing over the seashell curve of her body. How well they could fit into each other, those archetypes of masculine hardness and feminine softness, and how little place there was for me between them.

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.