No one could describe my wife as especially attentive—often when I returned home late I’d find that she had already fallen asleep. But now I would get in at midnight, and even after I had washed, arranged the bedding, and lain down to sleep, she still wouldn’t have come to join me in the living room. She wasn’t reading a book, chatting on the Internet, or watching late-night cable TV. The only thing I could think of was that she must have been working on the comics speech bubbles, but there was no way that would have taken up so much time.

She didn’t come to bed until around five in the morning, and even then I couldn’t say for sure whether she actually spent the next hour asleep or not. Her face haggard and her hair tangled, she would observe me over the breakfast table through red, narrowed eyes. She wouldn’t so much as pick up her spoon, never mind actually eat anything.

But what troubled me more was that she now seemed to be actively avoiding sex. In the past, she’d generally been willing to comply with my physical demands, and there’d even been the occasional time when she’d been the one to make the first move. But now, although she didn’t make a fuss about it, if my hand so much as brushed her shoulder she would calmly move away. One day I chose to confront her about it.

“What’s the problem, exactly?”

“I’m tired.”

“Well then, that means you need to eat some meat. That’s why you don’t have any energy anymore, right? You didn’t used to be like this, after all.”

“Actually…”

“What?”

“…it’s the smell.”

“The smell?”

“The meat smell. Your body smells of meat.”

This was just too ridiculous for words.

“Didn’t you see me just take a shower? So where’s this smell coming from, huh?”

“From the same place your sweat comes from,” she answered, completely in earnest.

Now and then, all of this struck me as being not so much ridiculous as faintly ominous. What if, by chance, these early-stage symptoms didn’t pass? If the hints at hysteria, delusion, weak nerves and so on, that I thought I could detect in what she said, ended up leading to something more?

All the same, I found it difficult to believe that she might genuinely be going soft in the head. Ordinarily she was as taciturn as she’d ever been, and continued to keep the home in good order. On weekends she prepared seasoned vegetable side dishes for us to eat during the week, and even made stir-fried glass noodles with mushrooms instead of the usual meat. It wasn’t actually all that strange once you took into account that going vegetarian was apparently in vogue. It was only when she hadn’t been able to sleep, when the hollows in her face were even more pronounced than usual, as though she’d deflated from within, and in the morning I would ask what the matter was only to hear “I had a dream.” I never inquired as to the nature of this dream. I’d already had to listen once to that crazy spiel about the barn in the dark woods, the face reflected in the pool of blood and all the rest of it, and once had been more than enough.