We couldn’t go outside that afternoon, I couldn’t, though E wanted to go to the store for ice cream. So I prepared the last of what was in the fridge for dinner. A fish I’d bought at the market, tomatoes, more lemons, more heat and flies and sugar. I cut the fish into pieces and pounded them into the wooden rental-company cutting board. When I picked up the pieces they were still studded with scales, scales that would, if she ate the fish, catch in E’s teeth, that would make her cry, that would cause her real pain, that would stick sharply in her gums and her teeth. I watched it all fry in the pan, the scales, the smashed pieces of fish. The oil speckled my wrists like teeth, while the fish crisped, then hardened into a burnt shell, and the pan became a wasteland strewn with glistening scales, as if the fish had, after death, grown a thousand eyes. We waited for M but he didn’t come. I threw the ruined, blackened fish away and E and I had crackers and cheese and tomatoes for dinner and we all three slept together, exhausted, in the same bed. I saw the coat hanging on M’s side of the closet before I fell asleep, it was as beautiful as I remembered. In the morning I found a rumpled suit in a pile beside the bed, as if M had collapsed there. As if he’d become suddenly so exhausted that he’d fallen out of his clothes and disappeared.

February

I think about you all the time. All the time I do. I think about you and I think about Wait and I think about Let Me Explain, and then I think again about you and then I think again about Wait and then I think again about Let Me Explain. Like that.

Can I tell you about the woman who sleeps in here with me? In the bed under the window? I’m so glad we have a window. Any day there could be a bird. And really it’s the windows that are important. Don’t you think? For houses? Without a window, well you could be anywhere.

Anyway, I wanted her bed when I got here but they wouldn’t let me take it. They said no. I asked why but they just said no.

That was before I understood. Or maybe that was the moment when I was beginning to understand. Understand, I mean, what kind of place here was. What kind of house. How I wasn’t owed an explanation. And I see that now, the purpose of that. Of the saying No. But, back then, back before I understood what I understand, when they said No, I said What, like this: What??! and screamed and yelled a bit and I see now why they did what they did when I did that. I want you to know that I know that. That I see it clearly.

Are you telling them what I’m telling you? Well, if you are, you can tell them that I know and see that now.