We pretended we lived in the woods. Or sometimes that we had gone to sleep and wouldn’t wake again for a hundred years. E wrote messages for me in the alphabet letters on the fridge and I would spend a long time at night trying to decode their mysteries, constellations of vowels and consonants that were so carefully arranged. Help me, I said to the letters. Really. Now. Really help me now. But of course I could never read them right and she was so many years away from learning how to spell.

E took to following me around the apartment, whispering, knock knock. The beginning of a joke. Only the first part though, she never said the rest. The game went on and on until I felt like a wound, gaping, food for invisible things. Knock knock, she said, over and over, as if there was no part of me that wouldn’t open if she asked. Maybe she just wanted to get outside. The games I played had to get better, brighter, much much much more fun. They had to keep us all happy, they had to keep us all inside. We painted the walls with a mixture of honey and flour and the last bit of glue E had from a bottle in her craft supplies bag. We painted this too on the walls in the bathroom and watched the flies get stuck.

But, more and more, E wasn’t asking about games and B was so sleepy he was barely even ever awake. Perhaps I should have called a doctor, or run out of the house down the street. We could still play though, so in a way, we were fine. B was quiet and we were quiet and quiet was good.

It was really night outside, that really dark kind of night that you can feel even with your eyes closed, even with the shutters on your windows shut tight. The kind of middle-of-the-night dark that touches your skin with its fingers all over and makes you shiver. That kind of dark. I’d tried to keep E awake as long as I could. Stay awake honey, stay awake baby, just one more game with Mommy, look we’ll be like this or this. We’ll be fawns and have a tea party under a tree, look at our hooves, our jam pies! Our hot mugs of tea! But she had said she was tired, that she felt sick, that she was hungry and couldn’t eat any more cold rice with syrup even though I told her a million times how delicious that kind of dinner was, how lucky she was to have it, how it could have been anything we imagined it to be.

Anyway she took her animals and went to bed, closed the door to her little room and shut me out. I thought about scratching at her door and saying I was a baby goat, asking her if I could crawl into bed with her for just a moment but I didn’t. It was really good and healthy if she wanted to be alone. It was amazing that she wasn’t afraid of the dark. More afraid of me I thought and had to break the thought with a quick hard laugh to make it not be true. How could she be afraid of me? We loved each other so much. I loved her with a feeling that sometimes crushed my own lungs and made me not able to breathe.