In the dark that night, that night that I was sneaking, I pulled open her drawer and grabbed a handful of tubes and tubs and bottles, all small things of various shapes. I meant to take them back to my room and examine them. Out in the hall though, I slipped and fell and the bottles crashed to the floor and spilled everywhere. When I got up I was standing on a handful of sharp little things. I made it back to my room and switched on my desk lamp and found several baby teeth stuck to the bottom of my foot. Afterwards I had a very particular horror of stepping on things and insisted on wearing slippers always in the dark, even under the covers of my bed. Children can be strange for all sorts of reasons.

E wasn’t tall enough to make a mess like this though, she couldn’t possibly reach up into the medicine cabinet or reach high enough to have been the one to have written with the lipstick on the walls up near the ceiling. It was my name anyway, that was written up there on the wall. It really was! And E couldn’t spell. Perhaps M had left for work in a rush. Perhaps he had been feeling unwell. Perhaps he had been upset. I cleaned the bathroom. Returned it to order, screwing the caps on the bottles, wiping down the sink, the faucet, scrubbing until everything was perfect. Standing on the toilet I could just reach the lipstick writing and wipe it away but it was quite hard and I almost lost my balance several times.

There were two trees that stood in a field across the street from the apartment I lived in with my mother. When the rains came as they often did, and clouds hung like a heavy grey ocean over the field it looked to me like the clouds, the ocean-clouds hung directly above these two trees, as if they, poor scraggly things, were the anchor for the whole world. It looked also, when the rains came, as if they, the trees, were about to be destroyed. The birds that lived in the field would fly to the trees and beat their wings just before the rain fell and their wings, then, as the colour drained from the field and everything grew dark, would look like black leaves shining, wet and slick and glinting in the last shreds of light.

The reason I loved and hated to watch them though, the birds, was that they could never decide which tree to shelter in, the one on the left or the one on the right. They could never decide which of the two would save them. Because it was plain that they knew, the birds, that one, but only one, would. They would settle in one tree, calling to each other, screaming almost as the winds came, and then one would leave, make the desperate flight to the other tree, and all the others, screaming, would follow. Perhaps I thought so often of these trees because my mind felt like this now that I had children, my thoughts so often screaming and beating their wings, flying uselessly from one tree to the next. Should I be worried now about the coffee cup or the pills? Was there some other thing I couldn’t see? Some disaster that I could not now imagine? The only safety, the only shelter, seemed to be to stay in the air, in constant flight.