AN OPEN ALTOIDS TIN balanced on the edge of the sink. Mickey recognized it from Ruth’s makeup kit, which sat open and ravaged on the back of the toilet. Mickey used that makeup before dinner. Blue mascara. She could barely remember the way the night felt back then. Ruth tipped the contents of the tin into one palm and patted the opposite corner of the sink with the other.

“Stand here.”

Mickey stood next to her and saw the tin wasn’t empty. Inside remained a collection of loose pills, round and scored and definitely not Altoids.

“What are those?”

“Nothing,” Ruth said, snapping the tin closed. “Just some medicine my mom got for when she flies—she hates airplanes. They take the edge off. I used to take them, too, but this works better.”

Ruth distributed the tin’s contents in a line along the sink: an alcohol wipe and a sliver of metal that she rested on a cloth made for cleaning glasses. It gleamed enough to catch the reflection of the faucet, which, in return, caught the reflection of the metal, like a conversation among believers of the same faith.

“I used to use shaving razors—if you break the cartridges, you can get them out individually—but then I saw these at the art store, and I never went back.”

Mickey watched as Ruth rolled up her shirtsleeve.

“Sometimes,” she said, “when everything hurts so much, you feel like you’re going to drown in yourself—like the whole world is quicksand and the harder you thrash, the worse it gets—this can help pull you back to the surface.”

At first, it looked like just skin. A metal shark fin leaving no trace. But then the blood rose to the surface and brought to Mickey’s mind the word “unzipping.” Ruth held the cut to the light and rotated her forearm, her skin opalescent against the dark blood. Her face was ashen, whiter than it had ever been. But her eyes were sparkling.

“Sometimes you just need to know where you are,” she said. “You know? Where the outside world ends and you begin.”

They watched as the blood trickled down the curve of her arm, gravity in color. But then she opened the alcohol swab and caught it. It was all hers, that blood. It belonged on her side.

Ruth wiped the blade with the rest of the swab as she pressed toilet paper to the cut, her fingers hard against her flesh. She looked at Mickey, the razor clean and shining in her outstretched hand.

“Now you try.”

PEYOTE

THE ROOM WAS EMPTY except for a solitary desk, which held a solitary computer. But not the flat, fits-into-your-back-pocket kind you have nowadays. This was a dinosaur of a thing: all sharp white corners and vented sides panting machine heat. The black screen bulged as if overcrowded, stuffed to the gills.

“Do we just type?”