“And as for your... condition?” he asks. He uses his eyes to gesture to my knot. “Are you with child?”

“Oh no, no. It’s just a knot. It won’t stop me from doing my job,” I explain. “It’s just how I look.”

“Fantastic. We like to give people opportunities,” he explains. “I believe in rewarding a hard worker, no matter the ah... circumstances.”

I shake his hand over the desk.

IN THE GROCERY STORE, THE LIGHTS ARE dazzling, the heads of the vegetables wanting for eyes. I move among the foods like a gone woman, hypnotized. I pile the cart high and trance my way to the meat counter.

“Hello,” says a man in a white coat.

“Hello, I’ll have some meat.”

“Well, yeah. What kind?”

He gestures at the spread below the glass. The meats are strange and new: Coiled like organs, too pink, chopped to bits, too full of white rivers of fat. None of the meats make sense here.

“I don’t... I don’t know.”

“Lady, nobody here has this much time to kill.”

My eyes finally land on the red meat I know, huge round hunks of it like from the earth. I imagine my father pulling this meat from the quarry, cleaning it, and selling it. I imagine the meat traveling here to meet me through a series of silver trains and black trucks.

“That one,” I say, gesturing.

“How much?”

“Two pounds.”

“It’s your world, lady, I’m just living in it.”

“Miss, you want to hurry up already?” calls a man from the line which has grown behind me.

His eyes are on the back of my neck, I feel them like the points of knives.

“It’s not like I don’t know my meats!” I exclaim to the large back of the meat man, to anyone who might be listening.

SOPHIA CALLS AND HER VOICE MAKES ME homesick. She lives in an apartment too, in our hometown, back near The Acres.

“It’s closer to the stores and the men,” she says. “I did meet someone new.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I met a man. He’s really wonderful,” she says.

The word wonderful is a foreign land.

“That’s great,” I say. “What is it like?”

“It’s hard to describe it. It’s beautiful. I never thought I’d be so deeply understood and fully completed as a human as I am now with Doug. How’s the city?”

“That’s great,” I say. “The city is just incredible.”

The lie strains through my teeth.

EACH MORNING, I YANK THE STRAY HAIRS from my face, brush my teeth, apply my makeup.

Then I put on the costume for work: Black pants, white blouse, green cardigan, low-heeled black shoes.