Kim returned the photo and was reaching for his shirt when her nail snagged on a plastic baggie. In the dim light, she couldn’t make out what was in it. When Kim opened the bag it had a peculiar smell. She went to the bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and dumped out the contents. There were six of them. They looked like dried apricots shriveled and sliced thin. They were an earthen color perhaps gone bad from having been kept too long. The brown hues ranged from a purple brown to shades of dirt brown and pinkish brown. They were different sizes some bigger than others, distinct in shape, with a perfect smoothness on the curved side, and an abrupt jaggedness on the other. Although they had a brittle appearance, when she picked one up she found it had a rubbery texture. Kim held it up to the lamp. Under the brightness of the bulb there were tiny microscopic hairs on the outer ridge like peach fuzz. After a moment, Kim realized it was a human ear.

She recoiled and dropped it. She’d heard of this sort of thing before. People gossiped about Vietnam vets who’d gone crazy, returning with decapitated fingers, severed toes, a necklace of ears. Now before her, six of them were scattered on her bedspread.

She wondered whose they were. She pictured them attached to different heads. One of the ears was so shredded it looked like a serrated knife had been used. One of them had a marking that looked like it had been a mole. Another one was peculiar because it was so concave. She imagined a man with ears like soup bowls having gone through adolescence a self conscious youth.

She wondered why her husband would keep these ears? Were these the ears of his captors, the prison guards, the torturers? Were they the ears from a memorable battle? Tokens that he’d hidden away, buried in a jail cell all of these years? Could they have meant this much to him?

There was an ear tucked beneath her pillow. It was so small she’d almost missed it. It had a short round earlobe. It looked delicate. There were seven in all then. This last one must have belonged to a child. She thought of Sophia and Marcel. She thought about Duc’s hands. Outside her apartment window, a dog began howling. The dog homed in on her third floor window barking fiercely as if he had sniffed them out.

Kim looked around her bedroom. The objects looked familiar—the bookshelf, the framed photos, the hanging ivy, the potted plant, the ticking clock. Everything was the same but nothing was as it was. The woman who had inhabited this room, it was clear she was gone too.