As soon as we entered her recently saged apartment, Blithe hugged Louise, a Great Dane. We had a good day. Only one person took a poop bag out of their trash can and threw it at us.

Back at the apartment, I cooked rice and beans and debated whether drinking wine in front of Blithe was appropriate. Aiden didn’t drink. He was with his new trainer, someone his L.A. person had recommended. I poured from a bottle of rosé that I had opened before the hex. The wine was less juicy than before. Blithe sat on the couch watching a nature documentary about coral reefs. I hoped that thinking about global warming would not push him further into the darkness, although I often wondered if human activity wasn’t causing the Shadowlands to move from the psychic to the natural realm. No one wanted to hear my unfounded theories.

I brought the two plates into the living room and went back for my wine.

The TV displayed the delirious color of reefs.

“You know, when I was growing up with my aunt, she never let us watch TV while eating dinner, which is weird because she also didn’t know what to talk to me about. She was a heart surgeon and always said the only people who could truly understand her were other heart surgeons, because they were such a difficult bunch. And that because they were such a difficult bunch, she never wanted to spend any time around them. I always felt like life was made of these impossible binds. I didn’t want to be around her, either, I wanted to be with my dead parents, and there we were, with no distraction, eating pasta.”

I turned to Blithe on the little couch.

“Snippets,” he said neutrally.

I sipped some wine. It was quite enjoyable using Blithe as a sounding board. “I guess if we’re really going to start talking about my Shadowlands, we’d have to go back to my parents’ deaths. That made the landscape particularly putrid. Can you imagine something organic dying and then sealing it up in an airless room and returning to it almost twenty years later?” My voice cracked.

“Mondo,” Blithe said, and pulled his knees to his chest. His plate sat on the coffee table.

I started to tell him about the first day I could identify being in the Shadowlands, when I went to sign the lease for the Ridgewood apartment. I was sitting in the management company’s trailer (yes, I wanted to rent directly from an owner, but that didn’t happen), and as I handed over the forms with both Margot’s signatures and mine to my future landlord, who wore an oversized construction hat so I could barely see his face, the taste of shit entered my mouth.

I side-eyed Blithe to see his response to such a wild detail.

He slept with his head against his knees.

I took our plates into the kitchen and covered his with foil. I topped off my wine and Aiden came home.