They sat, a woman with a blue dress and a woman with an orange dress, talking like old friends.

When Jazmynn moved to the bedroom the small woman followed her. She brought the plate of pasta along and they continued discussing the importance of objects—how they tether us and how sometimes they help to create connections, but also how they can be meaningless garbage.

They undressed, they kissed.

Jazmynn told the small woman about her partner, about their second date, about how the maple syrup had stuck to their hands. The small woman already knew about all this, Law had told her. But the small woman had known nothing of the steamboat, nothing, and Jazmynn was relieved that her partner had kept something from Law. Jazmynn regretted having shared so much with the small woman, and in a separate retelling she altered the story of the steamboat altogether. They did not speak of it again.

The small woman shared only two things about herself: that she had found the bulky necklace under a sequoia tree after her father had fallen ill, and that her father’s name was John. Jazmynn never learned the small woman’s name.

The two fell asleep on the bed with the basketball between them, and the rusted bicycle, the cans of chicken soup, the cans of corn, the canned peas, the floral tablecloth, and the plate of pasta the small woman hadn’t finished. They fell asleep with the cocoa butter between them.

In the morning Jazmynn hoped that the small woman would be gone, but she wasn’t, she was right there. The red lipstick was smudged on the pillowcases and the woman’s face emerged from between the pillow and the rusted bicycle. Jazmynn took the small woman’s hand and placed it on her left breast.

By the afternoon the two were washing the large windows together. It was in the middle of refilling the bucket with soapy water, and soaking the sponges, and gathering old newspapers that Jazmynn discovered the absence of the basketball.

She looked for it—in the hole, in the cornfield where the steamboat used to exist, under the kitchen table, under the floral tablecloth, on the highest shelf. Jazmynn cried. Into the pillows, into the cocoa butter, into the plate of hard cold pasta they hadn’t yet thrown away.

The small woman cried, wailing. She pulled out her curly hair.

Jazmynn touched the woman’s belly. It was hard and soft, terrible like a penis sometimes could be. Jazmynn moved her hand away when she felt it, as one might move away from a hot stove. But her calloused fingers could not help but reach. The index finger landed first, and she felt the S the P the A the L the D the ING humming underneath.

THERE’S D’ANGELO’S GAP