she’s statue-still on the mudroom steps, frozen, the big guy kneeling over neale, who is unconscious. his butt emerges as he shrugs down his sweatpants. two pillows of flesh fall away from the center furrow. she does not look at the furrow. the exposed flesh is gray, patterned here and there with small patches of angry red rash. this mass jiggles as he shifts around flat on neale to position her, set her in place.

the fire extinguisher. one step up from the one on which she’s standing. she picks it up slowly, to avoid the grating of metal against cement. there’s some sort of wire ring, a safety latch that needs to be removed. when she pulls this loose she uses her bad hand, which unfortunately doesn’t have enough fingers to keep the ring from falling onto the concrete with a small but definite ping.

the woman hears it and turns. her stare is fierce with calculation. no time to think. cate just rushes her with the white fog billowing out of the extinguisher, which sets her screaming like a frozen wire and zigzagging around the kitchen. cate loses track of her. she has to stay on the move. the big guy is turning around and trying to get up. she can’t have that. she starts spraying him, but too little is left. it’s then she starts swinging the can by its trigger, smashing his head wherever the metal lands. she doesn’t have a strategy.

She comes back to find herself hunkered over her knees, positioned against the slicing wind. Sailor is blissed-out, the air rippling through his fur like an invisible brush. He tries to get a rumble going, first with a terrier, then with a malamute. Since no other dogs are available, the three of them—in spite of their large discrepancies in size—gamely try to box and roll each other over, then set up a race. In between rounds, Sailor comes up and sinks his head into Cate’s lap.

“You’re the most handsome dog in the world. And you don’t even know it. Which only makes you more handsome.” She kisses and kisses the soft fur just above his eye. “And I got you. Imagine that.” She’s trying to let him know she’s still there for him, even though she’s a slightly different her. He has sniffed out the change.

And then he’s off again.

One of the changes is that she’s lost five pounds in the past month, without trying—part of the morphing, as though the person she’s turning into needs to make a lower weight, maintain a more agile vigilance. She suspects this isn’t temporary, that she’s made a permanent move to this interior neighborhood, some unincorporated area of aftermath.