The last time I saw my father, he kissed the palm of his own hand and held it up to me. I didn’t know what to do. Was I meant to mirror the gesture? Kiss his hand? High-five him? Press his hand to my face? It didn’t matter. There was no time. He was already in the car.

If even now, after so many pages, you have no mental image of him, no solid grasp of his personality or his form, I will say this: exactly. There is no tree; there is no forest. My mother knew: there’s a hole in the bottom. How can you binge on emptiness?

You may be asking: why have you been working so hard—all these weeks, all these years, all these pages—to sew yourself to a stranger?

I have no good answer for you.

That night, I heard Laurel’s breaths become deep and regular. I heard Harriet toss and toss and eventually start to snore. Then I heard Janet get up. She climbed quietly down the little ladder, but she didn’t immediately sneak out into the night. Instead she knelt by Laurel’s bed and kissed her on the forehead. Laurel moved a little, and Janet straightened. She seemed to waver for a moment before she turned and crept through the door of the dormitory.

I knew where she was going. I should have closed my eyes and nestled under the covers to furiously masturbate or cry or sleep, whichever came to me first. But instead, I threw off the blanket. The feeling I’d gotten from seeing them together had already started to dissipate. I could barely remember what her breasts had looked like, or where he had laid his hands. The bruise had already begun to heal. I wanted to press down, to repurple it. I wanted to see more.

Outside, I almost tripped over Ava. There was only one kitten with her. It looked up at me, the moonlight turning its two blue eyes to mirrors. I wondered, briefly, if the others had been drowned. Wasn’t that what you did with eyeless kittens? Or maybe they’d simply wandered off when their mother wasn’t looking, and fallen down one of the mountain’s cracks. Maybe they’d been snatched up by a hawk; maybe they’d flown for a moment before the end.

I leaned down to stroke the final kitten. (But who—? And who—?) Before I could touch him, he swiped, scratched me. Beauty, it hurts us. I swore, stood. I put my finger in my mouth and started across the grounds.

My very earliest conception of sex was this: my mother systematically placing my father inside her body, one bit at a time. First his hand, then elbow, then shoulder. Inserting each part evenly, carefully, and holding it there—there being an undefined opening in the stomach region—for a moment before removing it and inserting the next piece.