The backyard gate wasn’t locked. Carmen left her kitten heels at the threshold and stepped onto the soft mowed lawn in her stockings. The backyard had a pool and a smaller Jacuzzi lit up from beneath like a deep candle in a tall glass. There was a ceilinged patio with a built-in bar and huge chrome barbecue. She tiptoed toward the sliding glass doors covered with thick vertical blinds. She put her face to the glass so a circle of her breath fogged and dissipated on the surface. She placed an ear to the cool surface. Again it was like placing a head over a chest and listening to the heartbeat: the hum of the air-conditioning, the barely perceptible groans of an empty house settling into itself. She could hear no cat or tiger or lion. Had she imagined it all? Was she so desperate to think every other home held violence lurking?

A motion-detector light came on and illuminated everything in grotesque shadow. But no alarm had gone off, at least no alarm had gone off. Carmen imagined what she’d look like if the police showed up, barefoot in a sweaty suit pressed up against the glass. She wondered if this was what the Bottom felt like, that undefinable point of addiction when it could get no worse.

She’d read it somewhere once: about someone dying, alone, and the house cat eating pieces of her dead flesh bit by bit. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, a sad, morbid truth to be faced: Cats aren’t your friend, you pathetic, lonely idiot. And yet she remembered not feeling that way. She remembered thinking it a practical afterlife, to become useful finally, food not dust.

Carmen hadn’t expected the unlocked sliding glass door, really she hadn’t. Her hand traveled almost of its own accord and she was shocked to feel the levers give way, the door seamlessly slide to an opening of her size. She’d never done anything like this. The blinds rustled. A burst of cool air hit her face and before she knew it, she was parting the blinds, she was stepping into a stranger’s home.

She closed the door behind her. The living room was dark, illuminated by only the fuzzy trickles of fluorescent light from the patio. She could make out marble statuettes, a wrought iron bird cage, multiple glass menageries full of crystal and ceramic figurines. The walls were almost completely covered by painting after painting, a collection grotesquely mismatched—stoic Renaissance portraits, abstract linear sketches, tacky pop art à la Romero Britto. The living room, what she could make of it in the dark, was like a museum basement of cast-offs.