On the seventeenth anniversary of their friendship (which none of them realized was the anniversary as they disagreed on the circumstances of their first meeting), they bought a mirror. It was an oval mirror, and they hung it up against the yellow kitchen wall.

At first they enjoyed this reflective surface, how it echoed with accuracy and specificity their biggest flaws and most positive attributes; they even found beauty marks that the others had never pointed out.

The two who could not stop fucking would sometimes remove the mirror from its place on the yellow kitchen wall, while the others slept, in order to watch themselves climb on top, kiss, slip, and push their heels against the protrusion of five collarbones.

Unfortunately it wasn’t long before things took a turn for the worse.

A few weeks after the purchase of the oval mirror, the seven began losing patience with one another: the three men became self-conscious (continuously covering their thighs), and three of the women stopped going to work at the law firm. The men who were once orderly became untidy, and the women who were once untidy became orderly. The men slept apart and the women could not sleep at all, and therefore did not snore. The two stopped fucking and began masturbating in separate corners of the house. One of them began praying to God, and all of them fell deeply in love with one another.

Jealousy came into their lives like an insect pressing against the glass.

And so it was inevitable that they would go their separate ways. One by one, the seven left the peach house, the yellow wall, the bicycle tree, the thin curtains, the smell of mud coming from the river.

They moved back into the homes of their grandparents. They began wearing the three-piece suits and other items held together by buttons.

They never shared a bed with so many people again, which they regretted deeply. The seven often murmured to themselves in their seven separate homes about the thing they missed most: it was the feeling of bruises forming around their ankles, purple, swollen, and unmistakable—on this they could not help but agree.

FORTY-SEVEN DAYS AGO