“Soup,” I say, gesturing to the soup.

“Ooooh,” she says. “Soup! What kind?”

This is an attempt at friendship, a forcing, another labor among the current labor.

“I wish I had some soup!” she says, pulling her own lunch from her bag: A sandwich on square white bread with a limp piece of green lettuce between the crusts. She slides the sandwich between her thin lips, takes a bite, then speaks.

“You know, I know a guy who fixes that,” she says, her eyes on my torso.

The longer her eyes are on my knot, the brighter my rage glows. I stuff it down into my belly.

“Oh?”

“Yep, he’s even been on the local news,” she says. “His name is Dr. Richard Richardson.”

“Is that right?”

“Mhmm, he’s got these special injections to help girls like you. He’s a miracle worker. I went to see him for the corns on my feet. He fixed all 12 of ’em, they never came back. He froze them right off!”

I picture a dozen pieces of bad toe skin fluttering to the floor, one by one. She takes a pen from her back pocket and jots the number in black ink on a white napkin, which I jam into my back pocket.

“Thank you.”

I wash my bowl in the sink, imagining her awful feet, the awful frozen skin of her toes fluttering to the ground around her, the shed petals of a dead flower.

VISION

A perfect day in early fall: The sky bright and blue with the right style of clouds. I hold Jarred’s hand in the art museum, the old works of art looming over us.

There is a painting of bright flowers on a dark background nestled around the skull of a shark.

“And this painting, created in the 1900s, is fucking terrible,” he whispers.

My laugh bounces off of the canvas and back at us, an echo.

There is a statue of a woman draped in a snake, holding a mirror up to her own face.

“And this is a sculpture of a stuck-up bitch,” he hisses, pinching my side until I laugh.

There is a room made to look like Paris: Pastel walls, long mirrors, dazzling chandeliers. We are sore thumbs in all black, pricks of negative light in the setting.

“I hate this,” he whispers.

“It’s too perfect,” I whisper.

Then, we make it ours: We claw at the pastel walls. We lift the tufted chairs and smash them through the mirrors.

We dance on the shards, weave our bloody fingers together, our mouths meet in the center, over our reflections in the rubble.

THE OFFICE OF DR. RICHARD RICHARDSON is in a squat building with an orange roof. It looks too small next to the rest of the buildings, as if it comes from another time.

The sign with his name is aging, fake gold script that spells Dr. Richar and fades off.