We had a party. We bought twenty pounds of wings, three kegs of beer. When we dumped out the keg tub sludge in the yard, we found the pizza cutter, three forks, two steak knives, sixteen chicken bones, a gold hoop earring, and eighty-five cents in change at the bottom. We left the items spread across the grass until the grass grew over them.

Then—in the fall—they arrived. They came for the food we left dribbled on countertops and shattered across floors, loosely bagged in cupboards and drawers, and crusted in slicks on plates on our bedside stands. We found them in the kitchen, breakfasting on our toaster crumbs. We found them nested in our odorous shoes. They roamed freely—unafraid—procreating, manducating, urinating, and defecating.

We bought traps and stretched them. We cut up candy bars and placed the chunks gently. With two fingers we pinched the carcassed traps and carried them to the trash bin.

Then we laid the bait that made them sick slowly. They crawled off to die in the walls where we couldn’t reach them. They died in the air ducts. When we switched on the furnace, the sweet, heated stink of rot pushed from the grates.

They were cannibals. We found bodies—poisoned by us—the brains eaten from the skulls like soup from a bowl.

That’s fucked-up, he said.

Then one night he came home to our dark room. He reeked of spirits and of smoke. He took off his clothes, got into bed, lit a cigarette. He jumped, he yelled—he flung one from him. We saw it hit the wall—a soft thump. We watched it drop to the floor—still.

He picked up his cigarette from where it had fallen and walked to the wall, saw the thing was not dead—just stunned. He sprayed the body with a can of paint, then put it in a plastic bag, tied the bag shut, and left the room.

Through the window, I saw him outside—unclothed, smoking his cigarette—tossing the bag into the frozen yard. Then he came back and dropped his cigarette into a can of beer on the floor. He got into bed and put his hand on my middle.

No mercy, he said.

Soon, he took off my clothes. We heard a staccato of springs snapping, of necks breaking.

His regular techniques included the foot-in-the-door, the door-in-the-face, the low-ball, and the bait-and-switch—all of which I allowed.

THE IMPRECATION

A day after she died, the man came to cut the broken air-conditioning unit from the wall. The back end of the unit hung outside, beneath a messy tree. When the man pulled the unit through the hole into the house, dry leaves and little twigs and dirt and squirrel droppings and oblong pods fell all over the floor.

The man carried the old unit out the front door and down to the curb. The hole in the wall brightened the small, dim room—there was a fresh, cheerful feeling. A sense of serenity came from some glowing, floating dust.