The animals of her body were roaring back to life. They—whoever they were—had not turned Leonora into a monster. They had erased her. Newspapers, television, the terrible gabbling radio, which spoke only of the children’s father, the left-behind man, the single parent. That poor man, looking after his children. To lose all of them at once.

Poor Alan had held a funeral, had invited her. Though he’d asked her to come to the front, she’d sat alone at the back of the church—a church! Since when!—drunk and unmoored. Nobody spoke to her. She was a mother who’d let her children go, a creature so awful nobody believed in her. She’d had to turn herself into a monster in order to be seen.

“Madeline never got a chance,” said Mike Wooster. “To redeem herself. But you could. You could be redeemed.”

She laughed, or part of her did, a living thing sheltered in a cave inside of her. “Redeemed,” she said. “Like a Skee-Ball ticket.”

“Like a soul. Your soul can be redeemed.”

“Too late,” she said. “Soul’s gone.”

“Where?” he said.

“Where do you think?” she said.

At that he took her hand. “This only feels like hell,” he said. “I know. I do know.”

She shook her head to refuse his sympathy: she could smell the distant desiccation of it. No. Why had he come here? She could not be redeemed, a coupon, a ticket. He had a dead child, too. She could feel it twitching through his fingers, the sorrow, the guilt, like schools of tiny flicking fish who swim through bone instead of ocean. He was not entirely human anymore, either. Indeed, she could hear the barking dog of his heart, wanting an answer. Her heart snarled back, but tentatively.

If she accepted his sympathy, then she would have to feel sorry for him. She would have to transcend. Some people could. They could forgive and rise above their agony.

She could feel the turning of her organs in their burrows, and she felt an old emotion, one from before. Gratitude. She was thankful to remember that she was a monster. Many monsters. Not a chimera but a vivarium. Her heart snarled, and snarled, and snarled. She tried to listen to it.

“The thing,” Leonora told Mike Wooster, and she pulled her hand from his, “is that you can’t unbraid a challah.”

“No?” he said. “Well, I’d guess not.”

“Would you like some?” she asked.

He looked at the rubble of the day’s loaf. “Oh no. No, that’s yours.”

“Let me get you one. Please.”

“I don’t need—”

Leonora said, rising, “It will be a pleasure to watch you eat.”

The Get-Go