Because the lawn, which isn’t a lawn but rather mud flats, is under water. Though it’s not raining, it’s just the storms have become more extreme. They come at night, the storms, they blow roofs off, and they’d blow cows around if there were any cows around. “What’s with the men in the tents? What are they doing now, ten centimeters deep in water?”

DON

Asks

Hannah. Who has just arrived home. Don brushes a piece of human flesh from her collar. “No idea.” Says Hannah. She barely seems to notice Don and looks around the hall. “Is Peter back yet?” She asks. For Don, it’s as if her entire blood supply flows out of her body and into her heart, to drown the heart,

When she realizes that there will never be anything between her and Hannah. Jesus, all the things she had talked herself into believing in the past few weeks. That it was due to Hannah’s timidity and would just take a bit more time, or that the two of them just didn’t dare though soon it would come to pass that they’d accidentally brush hands and then they’d wrap their arms around each other and kiss and fall onto the mattress and …

Peter shows up and goes directly into the kitchen where Hannah is and looks into a pot, standing too close to her. What is there to see in a pot of spaghetti that is so wonderful? Other than Peter’s head, which for a moment Don thinks she’d really love to see floating in the boiling water. Don’s heart beats too loudly. She stares into the kitchen as if watching a traffic accident. Now they’ll pry the bodies out of the wreckage—

Violins, golden light,

Hannah stands behind Peter. Hannah laughs and throws back her head like a goddamn horse. Both of them are ridiculously attractive. In the style of heteronormative adverts.

Peter turns to Hannah. He lifts a hand, brushes an imaginary hair aside from her face.

From somewhere in the half-darkness of the flickering table lamp,

KAREN

Emerges. She sits down next to Don. “You have to imagine it as if you’ve taken drugs. Or that somebody put something in your drink. The worst drugs you can possibly think of. That cause hallucinations, things like the table lamp having sharp teeth, or Hannah having the face of a proboscis monkey, or you believing you can’t live without another person anymore. That everything that came before this person and will come afterwards will be as if the earth were a burned-out wasteland. No animals, no sun, just ice, cold, and steel-reinforced concrete ruins. The drugs allow you to believe this person is like the parents you never had, the parents this person never had, that you will keep each other warm like kittens. For your whole life.