I felt a cramp in my lower intestine and then a sudden gush as my bladder emptied over my thighs. I waited to collect myself to sufficiently to carry out my plan: get into the closet, stand up, turn on the light, and find a knife. I lay facedown in the mucus and dreamed of his laugh, rare and treasured, and the incredible length of his rib cage, how the bones sweetly bent toward the delicate beads of his spine. Then pain returned—memories of him buying gifts and taking taxis for his other girls, paying for it with my puny money all these months. I conjured images of my sagging plump body, the postures I assumed to seduce him but likely only repulsed him. He must be walking on air now, I thought. The relief he must feel! Had last night been engineered to trigger his escape? Or had he, too, experienced a sudden revelation: that not only was I not pleasing him, but that he was not pleasing me? All of his heroically polite efforts in vain, my devotion to him revealed to be impure. Or had it been my long, fluid honking throughout the night? He despised hysteria, was driven to nausea by the sight of weeping, and consigned to melodrama all professions of emotional discomfort. He only liked me when I was cheerful.

Then the manager of the DoNut Shop knocked on the door. I had forgotten she had promised to wake me up for an early shift. It was already five thirty.

I sat up. For fifteen seconds, I was sure he had come back to make peace, recover our life together … I scrabbled at my face, pulled on the door.

“Are you sick?” the manager asked when she saw me.

Yes, very sick, dead in fact. Especially now that she had killed me again simply by not being him. She was a small person, thin. I had managed to keep her from meeting him. The thought of them together had made me wary. She claimed to be intimately acquainted with the singers of the day, to have lived for years on the wit of her own songs and the stage name of Tiger Lily. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and she was vastly ambitious for the salaried glory in the back room of the DoNut Shop.

I banged my face hard against the doorframe. I could feel my face hitting the wood, and I knew there should be pain, but I could not feel it. My nose felt wet again.

“What’s wrong? Are you drugged?” She was worried. “Your nose is bleeding.”

I didn’t answer.