The metal chair was too warm to sit on so I sat on the concrete slab floor and slept with the light on until my soaked body woke me and I could no longer sleep to the boiler’s never-ending machine breath. I scanned the fucks that Fellis and I had scratched into the walls over the years hiding in this room from the winter cold and that was what I said—fuck. The machine breath blew steady and my stomach hurt. Something squeezed me in my gut and out came more sweat and I bit my fingernails for a while and spit them on the concrete around me and when I bit too close to the skin I wiped the blood on my white shirt and I tried to fan cool air in my hot face but it was all warm air and I wanted to hit something so I hit the wall but it was loud and so I slapped the concrete floor around me and then I kicked and kicked and kicked the boiler and it whistled and hissed at me to stop and so I stopped and curled in a dirty dusty corner and I yelled to her.

I slapped at the walls and yelled to her again and again and again. The door flung open and the cold hit me and the dawn light shut my eyes. She was there one minute holding a root club ready to beat someone and then the next she was gone and back again with a blue Pendleton blanket. She lifted me up and covered me and I saw it was her favorite blanket and so when I threw up I pushed the blanket away and spilled rice and peas and meat onto the ground.

“Make it stop,” I said. My head fissured open and Mom said so softly into it that she would and she put the blanket back over me and we went up the steps and through the door where no machine breathed but the clock ticked slow and loud and the fridge hummed and down the hallway Mom opened my bedroom door and all my stuff was there and she pulled back the blankets on the made bed and she took off my shirt and stripped me to my underwear and slipped me under the blankets and she was gone for a moment and when she came back she set a wastebasket lined with plastic next to me on the floor and after she’d gone again I threw up in it and she came back and changed the plastic and then brought a kitchen chair and sat next to my twisted body in the bed.

She put a warm wet washcloth on my forehead.