“I’m fine. Just a bit tired.”

“Well, don’t bring that in here,” he says. “Sleep is for the home!”

Outside, the city glints in the morning sun. The knot is a gnarled black pit beneath my blouse, a ticking bomb.

TODAY, IT IS RAINING. I WEAR A THIN dress, no coat, a fool.

The city continues to burst with tragedies:

Three pigeons peck at a pile of vomit.

A woman urinates on the sidewalk.

A man is lifted onto a stretcher, his bony feet protruding from the bottom of the thin sheet that covers his body.

On one corner, a man holds a sign that says: I have been to war and back!

The rain pelts my skin through the thin cloth. I put my wet head down.

VISION

I take Jarred out into the throat fields because I need something to strangle.

“It’ll be five dollars per,” a man in overalls calls to us and I pay.

“It’s been a long week at work,” I explain.

“I don’t understand,” Jarred says.

Discomfort blares off his skin in the sun. This is his first time, and I want it to be tender.

In the field around us, bare necks reach toward the sun, short stalks of flesh, the raw edges of the throats blooming the color of old blood at the center.

How did he see me before this? Poised with the right hair. Now, I am disheveled, wearing filthy sweats, bags under eyes.

Lately, the fury has been keeping me up. My anger boils under my skin at work, beneath the fluorescent lights of the office. All I have ever wanted is a soft place. At night, I dream of rooms filled with feathers or cotton which will keep us both safe.

“You don’t feel the same anymore, do you?” I ask out in the throat fields.

I can feel his ebbs and flows instantly. I know when he is turning from me in the slightest way, as if the face of a flower toward a second sun, or a planet drifting from its stationary orbit.

“Remember the good days?” I ask. “You loved me once.”

He looks carved as stone: No words, just that straight face.

“Say something,” I say. The necks keep their stance.

The silence is bigger than suns, it is the silence of distant galaxies. The universe begins to crumble. The rage roars truck-like through my blood.

I throw myself to my knees in the field. I grab a good neck, a thick neck. I look up at him with my mania. The rage multiplies and I wrap fingers around the flesh.

“SAY SOMETHING,” I scream.

I clench hard, good around the throat. I squeeze until my fingers want to break. The skin caves in beneath, which feels good, a nasty satisfaction. I strangle harder, until I go dizzy from lack of oxygen, until my rage deflates.