“How’s quarry life treating you?”

“Good, good, you know — meat and blood!”

“I made your favorite!” my mother chirps. “The red potatoes you like!”

At the table, everything looks cut from a magazine: Red tablecloth, food heaped on plates, full glasses of wine.

“Here’s to this family!” my father calls, the sweet sour back on his breath, a glass of liquor in his hands.

“To family!” my mother calls back. We clink our glasses, fill our plates, begin to eat. All of the food is beautiful but cold.

“I never know when to take it out of the oven,” my mother says.

They’re all going to die one day, my heart calls again.

I PICTURE IT: THREE TOMBSTONES, THREE times my head over the casket, three perfectly still faces in repose, three times the hollow sound of soil hitting casket.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asks.

I can’t speak, my chest is paralyzed, my lungs won’t make air.

“I know you hate coming home,” she says. “I know you can’t stand it.”

My mouth is stuck open, pained, the terrifying future stuck in my head, chiseled into the gray matter of my brain.

“It isn’t that,” I say finally.

“Just admit that you hate us and you don’t want to be here,” she says, slamming down her fork.

My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.

“MY BACK IS FUCKED,” MY FATHER SAYS that night after dinner. “They’ve got me whacked out on these new pills.”

“Stop digging in the quarry,” I say.

“Whose gonna pay for my home when I need it?”

He sits at the table, face contorted, eating vanilla-bean-flecked ice cream.

For a moment, he is the emperor, milk and sugar dissolving against the heat of his mouth.

My mother reigns quietly in the corner, eating nothing, her thin wrinkled hands on the table, two small dead birds.

I VISIT SOPHIA BEFORE I GO BACK TO THE city. She is in a new house. There is her man and her children everywhere. I eat dinner quietly, let the scene absorb me.

“Nice to finally meet you,” Sophia’s man says.

“You too, I’ve heard so much about you.”

We make painful small talk through dinner: Work, men, the city, the kids, Sophia’s new hair.

“So how are you?” she asks after dinner. “How’s your exciting life in the city?”

“Oh, it’s wild,” I say. “I’m out every night. Things are just so busy. Work is great, but the nightlife is something else entirely.”

On the train ride home, I sob against the window through which the landscape flashes, back into the city.

I MOVE MY BODY TO THE OFFICE UNDER the black fog of deaths that haven’t happened yet. The calendar says Monday.

“What’s off with you?” the boss asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Your eyes are all glassy. You’re radiating a bad vibe.”