Even with symptoms of poisoning and under the influence of drugs, even compulsively asleep during class, Karen’s performance was better than all the other students. The teachers, who were used to all sorts of behavioral problems, didn’t speak to Karen about her condition. Which was better. Because Karen didn’t have a condition. She had no sense of anything, she was wasted. And moved like a machine through the daily routine she hadn’t chosen. At night, or early in the morning, when Karen went to sleep, she perceived vaguely that her disabled brother had died. Mother was crying. But perhaps she had dreamed this. Her older brother seemed to pray nonstop. Later Karen stopped going home or to school. She had a room in a factory. Clients were serviced there and children like Karen were housed, and she no longer saw Patuk so much there.

A strange empty time elapsed, from which she suddenly awoke. Karen sobered up. She had a headache, pain in her arms, legs, in her stomach, in her ass. The light in the room was too bright, the noise too loud. There was nobody else around. Maybe clients’ diminishing interest in Karen had made the minder careless.

Get up, then. Everything dull, and her legs, goodness, don’t think of your legs, they hung pale and thin from a somewhat swollen abdomen. Karen let herself drop from the second-floor window, barely feeling the impact of her body because there had been greater trials in the last few months than an embarrassing jump from a window, and ran through the night to her former home. Nobody was there. The little brother dead and buried, the other probably off with Allah.

Karen washed herself for two hours, knowing she was fulfilling all the clichés about deranged girls, who were themselves somehow to blame for everything, primarily because there wasn’t a penis attached to them. She threw her clothes out, took from her older brother’s dresser a hoodie and army pants that he didn’t need anymore with his new nightgown look, sat down in the kitchen and waited for the rest of her family to turn up.

Hours later,

KAREN’S MOTHER