The garbage was starting to smell but I didn’t mind it now. I liked it maybe and the mould from the lemons in the bowl puffed up into the air like green smoke if I touched them, just giving themselves up like that into nothing and I liked that too. Who is touching me, I didn’t think, didn’t ask the lemons, didn’t show them my arms, my face, my neck.

I thought, I should call M. I should tell him to come home, but I only thought it quietly. Besides, I had found it floating, my phone I mean, in the mop bucket, all soaked through and abandoned, its face gone blank and dead in the grey water. Now, I took the phone out of my pocket and set it in the crack between the guest-room door and the wall and crushed it slowly, using the door, just watching the screen bend, then feeling it give, feeling it break richly under the weight of my hands.

I curled up behind the bags as if they were some kind of fortress and closed my eyes. Click. Maybe I heard the lights in the apartment. Maybe there was someone at the door, but I was safe in the guest room behind the garbage. Maybe I was. I covered my eyes and lay still in my burrow as the hours passed and listened for the sounds of my children, ready to jump straight up if they needed me. I’m here, I’m here, I would shout if they asked for me. Don’t worry, I’ll always be right here with you.

17

The days folded together like a map crumpling in on itself, continents crashed, tectonic plates ground together like bad teeth, oceans dropped away to nothing. I made food for E, bits and pieces of things that got wilder as our cupboards were stripped down to their studs. We licked the food off our plates and stopped using forks and knives. Dried pasta we could crunch in our teeth. We painted our arms with the last of the bottled sauces and whooped at each other.

E began to look a bit pale, dark circles flowered beneath her eyes. I told her she was a garden inside a garden inside a garden and hugged her tight and close. She began keeping her animals in a box under her bed. She didn’t want me to play with them even though I offered. Let’s get out baby giraffe, I would say, let’s get him out and let him run around the tops of the curtains. He’s asleep, she said. Don’t wake him up. The others? Baby orangutan? They’re all asleep, she said. Every morning she woke up with more red marks. XOXO is for hugs and kisses. Bites mean I love you so much I’ll eat you up. There was an old owl who lived in an oak, whiskey, whaskey, weedle, I told her. And all the words he ever spoke were fiddle, faddle, feedle.

There was someone else, I was sure, in the apartment, making E’s bed, tending to her. When I went to check on her in the middle of the night her sheets were always tucked up perfectly tight, right underneath her chin. One morning I found all her clothes folded and put away, the corners of all her little shirts teased into sharp angles, looking like they’d all been pressed with an iron. Sometimes I thought I heard someone singing to B while he slept, sometimes I sort of startled awake and found it was me that was doing it, me that was singing.