Finally B fell asleep, sagging all at once against me in the most horrible/wonderful, horridful, way and I set him down in his crib. This was what it was to be a good mother. My fingernails were dirty and too long but who was there to see me? So I reached down into his crib and brushed the hair off his forehead with my scab-crusted hands. I blew him kisses, one two three, for good luck and goodnight. Sweet dreams. See you in the morning. Shhhh.

I waited then, after I was done laying him down, for whatever had been gathering to come and get me, but the apartment was quiet and empty and the dust stayed only dust. I bagged up the trash in the kitchen, the bits of dinner that couldn’t be saved for another day, the peels and the rinds and the egg shells. I cinched it all up tight and put it in the guest room, against the wall on the far side of the room, away from the shopping bags, away from the eiderdown.

I dripped a little water onto the plant and turned it a quarter turn. It was looking sick, its tentacles were turning a pale waterlogged green as if they were drowning from the inside out. Perhaps I was doing everything wrong for it. I turned it another quarter turn and left. Well what else could I have done? It’s impossible, isn’t it? Always having to decide what will be saved.

Once I wiped down the counters there would be nothing else to do until morning. I could sit or stand or float or run around and around and around the rooms as long as I was quiet. For a while I scritch scratched the knives against the sharpening stone. The angle is so important, the exact angle of the blade against the stone. Three strokes on one side of the blade, three strokes on the other, one hand on the handle, the pads of index and middle fingers balanced at the tip. Scritching and scratching. Precision, concentration. Afterwards, test it. Feel how, with a sharp blade, a thing can be cut without resistance. Without any resistance at all.

There was a smell in the apartment, something nice, warm wax and wicks burning and when I left the kitchen to investigate I found the table all lit up with candles as if for a dinner party. In between the candles the table was strewn with matches of all sizes like confetti and something sunk in me then, all cold like a heavy thing going fast through water. Something that just plunged right through me I mean, and I thought that I could see someone sitting at the far end of the table in a chair pulled out just for her. But of course it was all only smoke.

At some point I slept because I woke on the floor in the bedroom. The room was already hot and I was sweating because, I found, I was wearing my long brown coat all buttoned up from top to bottom. E came into the room, sleepy, and asked me about it, about the coat, why I was wearing it over my pyjamas and I said, thinking quickly, Well I thought today we’d stay in the apartment and play explorers. How does that sound? We can play all day together right here, I told her. Doesn’t that sound like great big buckets of fun?