After the babies hatch though, after they can fly, they have no more use for the nests. They leave and they leave the nests abandoned. As they should! As nature demands them to! After they leave, the feathers are left behind of course and rightly like garbage, like juice boxes, like yogurt tubs, like any other kind of trash.

More and More and More and More and Always February

Oh you clean here too? Not just up in the rooms? But isn’t it the middle of the night? It’s so hard to keep track of time when, well, when I’m down here. There aren’t any windows down here. But of course you can see that. I’m just going to go back to sleep now, if that’s all right with you. It’s just that, well, these treatments make me so tired. It’s the drugs maybe. I didn’t know that. That you cleaned down here. I’m sorry, I think I threw up somewhere. I’m sorry about that.

Do you know she didn’t come back? The woman with the ugly daughter? She never came back from the dentist. And I’ve been asking where she is. I’ve been asking and asking and asking but no one is hearing me. No one is hearing me at all.

Could you tell one of the guards to bring me some water? Sometimes they will. I’m so thirsty.

14

I stopped for a coffee inside one of the department stores on the Rue de Rive. I piled my bags up on the chair opposite me as if they were someone I could talk to. Quack, I could have whispered to my bags if I hadn’t been in such a fancy place. I watched a woman with short ice-blonde hair slicked back from her face eat oysters at the bar. The man with her had poured her a glass of champagne but she wasn’t touching it. She wasn’t touching him either. Just the oysters. She slipped them one by one down her throat. Once or twice she checked the time on a rose-gold watch barnacled all over with diamonds that peeked out from the arm of her smart blue blazer.

I thought then, watching her, of something funny and smart to say about her and I wanted to tell M the thing that I had thought of. I wanted him to see her too, and I wanted him to see me. Me here and her. The woman with the gold watch and man she wasn’t touching. Of course M wasn’t there though and I had only my bags to talk to. Tant pis, I could have said, just then, and halfway I could have meant it.

We used to go to a particular restaurant, M and me, for celebrations, which at the time was another way to say Friday night. We only had enough money for two drinks per celebration. So we only got one each, one drink. The trick was to make the one drink last long enough for both of us to eat our fill of the free snacks, peanuts and olives and some kind of spicy cracker, so we wouldn’t be starving in the morning. The trick was to do this but to be not obvious about it.