The bruises on my face and arm were almost gone now but in the half-light of the apartment they could look on my skin like the leafy shadows of equatorial trees. We could pretend like the dusty socks that were accumulating on the floor were the eyes of crocodiles floating in a muddy river. We could pretend that the beds were flat-bottomed river boats gliding over all the things we couldn’t see. We wouldn’t have to leave the apartment. I wasn’t even really sure if I could get my hands to open the door.

I bolted both locks and did up the security chain. Feeling suddenly like there were eyes watching me, I covered over the peephole with tape. I put tape too over the face of the clock in the kitchen because we were alone alone alone and we could eat when we were hungry and sleep when we were tired and be as free as birds inside here where we already were. Where we would stay.

I made lemonade and spilled the sugar on the counter, all the little crystals tinkling like sand made out of glass or bones. There! I said triumphantly. Now the ants will come! But I felt, well a breath, or something like a breath, shiver down the back of my neck and I remembered those eyes made out of dust or something else and I cleaned up all the sugar and bit my knuckles quick for luck.

I cut the last cucumber into shapes that were supposed to look like monkeys or tropical flowers. E could barely pick them up, they were that thin and slippery. We ended up licking them off the table like wild animals. Sometimes my heart would begin to beat hard and I would gasp to catch my breath but mostly it was lovely. A whole day spent picnicking in the shade.

It could have been late or it could have been early whenever we went to bed. I took E and B with me. We all piled in together. E and B drifted off smiling and I lay there with them, loving them that much. It was like that sometimes, being a mother, like feeling all the screws tighten down inside you.

Eventually I untwined myself from E and took B to his crib. I wanted to take the garbage out but that sticky shutter wouldn’t let me so I just scooped all the leftover food into another black plastic bag and even a plate or two that I couldn’t see my way through to cleaning and set it down in the guest room next to the other bags of garbage. The flies smiled then and rubbed their little hands together like good children. I came back into the kitchen and arranged the alphabet letters on the fridge to say I love you for E to see even though she couldn’t read yet.

The point was now mainly to move quickly. The point was to be quicker than whatever was coming, slipping into the apartment like bad thoughts, to be busy enough that whatever it was that was there couldn’t get me. The darkness, the child, the dusty eyes. To be quicker and necessary and needed and full of love. To move and move and move through all the hours until the children woke and were ready to play and keep me high and dry and safe from winking out inside my clothes and disappearing into nothing. What is a mother anyway when her children are asleep? What could she possibly be? If a tree falls in the forest. It’s like that isn’t it?