I’m well aware that there are more humane ways to dispatch slugs. You can let them drown happily in beer. You can kill them instantly by dropping them into boiling water. But the dried-out, green-white rings around my garden pleased me. I thought they might act as a deterrent to other pests.

All my watering cans tend to rust through quickly. I keep the ruined ones. I like to line them up against the wall of the house and admire the rust-rimmed gashes in their sides.

I’m mostly iron now, I think. I close my eyes and scan my body for evidence: trying to sense my magnetic field, or imagine the efficiency with which oxygen is delivered to my various systems. I hold still and listen to my hurrying blood: in a rush to burn holes through the vessel that carries it.

The Drydown

Have you noticed any changes? Good or bad?

I don’t cry so often. That, and my digestion’s better.

Better? You mean, more regular?

Yes.

Anything else? Have there been side effects? Nausea? Sweating? Problems achieving climax?

The doctor’s pen was expensive; gloss-black, heavy. It scratched away, competent and discreet, making remarks that he could review later, at his leisure.

No, I said. Then I thought about it, and added, It makes it easier to give things away.

Andrew had suggested we move in together. This is how I know that it’s not so hard to give things away. He came to the apartment I was sharing with my sister, Isolde, and after letting his gaze range over the living room, with its balding velvet sofa and worn clothes and used teacups strewn around the floor, told me to lay out my things and assign each of them a score from one to ten, based on its usefulness. We took everything that scored below a nine to the charity shop, the nearby Greek Orthodox one that reeks of mothballs, where most clothes are hung up so high that the tiny, black-clad women who work there have to retrieve them with a hook attached to a pole. They have my formal dress now, and my childhood toys. They have my mother’s gloves. Too small for you, said Andrew, and he was right; they wouldn’t stretch further than my knuckles.

And my grandmother’s wedding dress – they have that too. Andrew pointed out that I’ll never wear it. For example, he said, if we were getting married, you’d want something simpler, more modern. And if you’re not going to wear it, why keep it?

Andrew was in favour of them. The SNRIs. Of course I love you, he said. It’s just, all the crying. The moods. I can’t handle you when you’re like that.