Stefanie tried to let her muscles go limp. Her heart was racing. She could taste blood on the inside of her mouth. She thought about Aaron’s student loans. She thought about his limp dick and shaved chest, his shaved scrotum in the mirrored door of his bedroom closet, the lack of molding in a mediocre condo, drugstore toiletries, adult Ritalin and razor blades and a bong in the kitchenette. Aaron’s framed photo of a childhood dog with a face like a shriveled chrysanthemum. Stefanie envisioned Aaron kneeling before her. She brought the head of a hammer down full force into the center of his dirty-blond skull.

In the hospital, Stefanie was saying something to her mother about how it smelled. It stank.

Her mother, wearing a black fox-fur vest with extra tufts of fox around the armholes, nodded. She was seated in a chair, and she wore leggings, a pair of supple Fendi over-the-knee boots, her hair in a ponytail, unhurried makeup. But it was her mother who reeked, Stefanie meant. It was her mother who reeked of steamed skim milk and rabbit turds, her faithless genitals crushed together in the elastic hammock of her legwear.

Stefanie said, “I would like to see you get raped by a pig.”

Stefanie’s mother had the BlackBerry out and was peddling in some crucial announcement. Her eyeballs recalibrated behind spikes of dried mascara. “What, Stef?”

“I said,” said Stefanie, but at this moment a doctor in a white coat entered.

“Well, hello.”

Stefanie let her head roll. She provided the doctor with what she believed was an excellent view of her upper teeth. She saw herself sever a magnificent slab of flesh from the doctor’s right thigh, rub her face in the sticky heat of this thing. All its sick oils and weeping would get on her; it would dry caked on, a mask.

Stefanie gave the instruction slowly, precisely, in order that it not be mistaken. “I. Need. A. Knife.”

Later it was termed an iron deficiency.

The doctor prescribed some supplements.

Anyway, Stefanie quickly realized that she could not talk like this.

To be continued . . .

Clare thinks she knows why she had not finished. The effort necessary to the illustration of the weird carnage to come—the psychotic eros, the final sex-murder scene with the father—seems monumental, stupid, entirely crippling now.

Other students bit their lips. This is to say, in workshop. They stared at everything except Clare’s face. Eventually conversation coalesced around Aaron’s grooming habits. A long collective interrogation transpired regarding scrotal depilation, its pros, cons.