She lay quiet for a moment, trying to summon saliva so she didn’t have to get up. Her head was as dry as a cotton ball. Finally, she threw the blanket back, only to find the threads pooled around her bed. It was like she’d turned into a cat overnight and had fallen asleep in a knitter’s basket.

She sat up and pulled her fingers through the mess, feeling where they tugged, loosening words that had caught in the mess like a poem spilled. Hunt fell off the side. Home held four threads in the angles and nooks of its consonants.

“God, I need water.”

So she stood, gathering the strings like a cape and tossing them en masse over her shoulder. They trailed behind her. She was too thirsty to think about their nature right now. She had to get a drink, and then maybe she would find some scissors to cut herself free.

She tiptoed past the sleeping Wives, curled into their blankets like doped-up cherubs, their fingers intertwined, their hair loose over arms they used as pillows. It was dark. The stars were a weak night-light tonight, barely filtering through the lacy curtains. The floor creaked and moaned on her way to the door, which groaned like a woman stretching. She tripped across the threshold and stumbled into the hallway.

“What the…?”

One string had freed itself from the others and looped around her ankle. She tugged and felt a pull in her chest. There, her right breast was where it started. She grabbed it in both hands and gave it a few tugs. No pain. In fact, it felt satisfying, like touching a bruise in your mouth with the tip of your tongue. Of finding the itch in your ear with a long fingernail. She tugged once more, sliding her hands down the string’s tension. It continued out in front of her and around the corner. Moving down its length hand over hand, she followed.

The silky length tumbled loose down the stairs, and she picked it up as she went, gathering a handful of thread, then an armful. Around another corner and into the hall. It must have been taking her to the kitchen, a lifeline to water. Her mouth opened in anticipation. So thirsty.

She walked faster, one bare foot stepping over a torn page from a home decor magazine, her elbow knocking a framed portrait to the ground so that the glass shattered on the hardwood. She tried to make out the face behind the broken glass—a tall man, his long hair pulled back in a single braid—but the break began in his face, and she couldn’t tell who he was.

She walked ahead, eyes on the small window above the kitchen sink like a buoy in the dark. But two strides from the linoleum, the thread pulled, and she stumbled. She collected its length in the basket of her arms and used a hand to tug. The tension turned right, not straight. But the kitchen…the water…