Alice Coltrane playing the harp in the background while Kendra’s son considers the muscles of the woman’s uterus, contracting even now, even as he stands there looking at her, with his body emerging halfway through the opening in the floor. Yes, Kendra’s son thinks, the lining of her uterus must be shedding.

And the woman does not complain about the pain. After all, they’re only muscle contractions. She is used to it by now, she began her menstrual cycle early, at nine years old while lying on a twin bed at a religious summer camp.

At nine, the woman hadn’t been frightened by the blood, as her mother had prepared her for all of that. The woman, who was then only a child, gathered the color on her small fingers, and she waited quietly for a camp counselor to stumble upon her impatient body.

Kendra’s son is looking patiently at the woman in the corner. The woman is always in the corner.

It’s not something to be misunderstood—the corners are where the woman resides. After many weeks of quarreling over the space, they came to this decision together. The woman comes alive in the corners.

It’s not that the space is small. In fact, the room in which they’re both standing—the woman in her corner facing the wall, and Kendra’s son within his opening in the floor—is significant.

There’s space enough for a very large bed, and a very large chest, and a large bookshelf filled with many books, a small sofa, a large built-in closet, and a very large handmade wooden desk, a lamp. But since they couldn’t stop yelling and biting, they decided, very diplomatically, that the corners would be hers.

My favorite type of vision is the peripheral kind, the woman used to tell Kendra’s son, I like being on the periphery of things.

Together they created a trap door in the center of the room, within the floor, so if Kendra’s son were to enter he could avoid intruding upon the woman’s corners.1 Anytime Kendra’s son sought entry from the door in the floor, he would already exist there, within the nucleus of the significant room.

And that’s where Kendra’s son stands, after having climbed up from beneath the house, through the tunnel in the earth. He’s there, disheveled, but already in the center.

There are four separate doors for the woman, entrances and exits only accessible from the corners of the room. Two of them open onto a garden with rows of basil and rosemary and purple carrots and baby’s breath.

So they each have their own means of entry and escape, and this, Kendra’s son thinks often to himself, is the key to their harmonious affair.