She has lost weight. The bones have shed all but the minimum connective tissue; her face is strained over the bones with an expression of far-seeing, expectant sweetness. Her voice emerges from this apparition more strongly than before, with less hesitation between words.

“I’m tormented something cruel at night, Harry. Did Earl tell you?”

“He mentioned bad dreams.”

“Yes, bad, but not so bad as not being able to sleep at all. I know this room so well now, every object. At night even that innocent old bureau and that—poor shapeless armchair—they.”

“They what?” He sits on the bed to take her hand, and fears the swaying under his weight will jostle and break her bones.

She says, “They want. To suffocate me.”

“Those things do?”

“All things—do. They crowd in, in the queerest way, these simple homely bits of furniture I’ve. Lived with all my life. Dad’s asleep in the next room, I can hear him snore. No cars go by. It’s just me and the streetlamp. It’s like being—under water. I count the seconds I have breath left for. I figure I can go forty, thirty, then it gets down to ten.”

“I didn’t know breathing was affected by this.”

“It isn’t. It’s all my mind. The things I have in my mind, Hassy, it reminds me of when they clean out a drain. All that hair and sludge mixed up with a rubber comb somebody went and dropped down years ago. Sixty years ago in my case.”

“You don’t feel that about your life, do you? I think you did a good job.”

“A good job at what? You don’t even know what you’re trying to do, is the humor of it.”

“Have a few laughs,” he offers. “Have a few babies.”

She takes him up on that. “I keep dreaming about you and Mim. Always together. When you haven’t been together since you got out of school.”

“What do Mim and I do, in these dreams?”

“You look up at me. Sometimes you want to be fed and I can’t find the food. Once I remember looking into the icebox and. A man was in it frozen. A man I never knew, just one. Of those total strangers dreams have. Or else the stove won’t light. Or I can’t locate where Earl put the food when he came home from shopping, I know he. Put it somewhere. Silly things. But they become so important. I wake up screaming at Earl.”

“Do Mim and I say anything?”

“No, you just look up like children do. Slightly frightened but sure I’ll save. The situation. This is how you look. Even when I can see you’re dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. All powdered and set out in coffins. Only still standing up, still waiting for something from me. You’ve died because I couldn’t get the food on the table. A strange thing about these dreams, come to think of it. Though you look up at me from a child’s height. You look the way you do now. Mim all full of lipstick, with one of those shiny miniskirts and boots zippered up to her knee.”