I joined a new church. It is a tiny church and there are few people who go. It’s next to a cornfield. I started taking the kids. JP wouldn’t be caught dead there, he’s a Methodist and this is a severe and true Catholic church for Charismatic Catholics which is as hardcore as you can get really. Here is what gets me, Lord: how you let us all just be so lost, how you let events pile up in a person’s life and push them one way or the other and then in the end they get pushed right off the edge. How are we meant to protect our children from all the bad things, all the danger, all the murderous psychos and the war and the accidents. It got so I wouldn’t let them out of the house, and I wouldn’t send them to school. JP would go to work and I would say goodbye and then keep them home all day. There was one school bus that went on fire and all the children burned. I was up all night thinking about that. I felt like something terrible is going to happen anyway so maybe get it over with now when they are sleeping. I just need it to be quiet. Now I am here and they are upstairs and they are not in this world anymore but the next. They get to be happy and pure and saved and I am condemned to walk the earth with the mark of Cain on my forehead. Everyone will know I have done what no one can do. Very few. I asked so many times for God to save me and purify my thoughts, to give me even five minutes of respite. But God was silent. He didn’t say anything or extend any mercy on me. Silent and smug, the smugness of total power and total indifference. And now here I am and I

Joad stared at the letters on the page until they began to dissolve and float. Then she put the two leaves of onionskin paper back together and tried to fold them up. Her fingers felt clumsy, their movements approximate. Giving up, she stuffed the pages back into her shirt pocket, thinking, “That’s why the house was so cheap.”

In the middle of the night, Joad whipped off the covers and stood; the room slanted. She gripped the wall, confused. Delicately, she made her way to the bathroom, legs planted wide. From the toilet, she observed a gentle floating of the light switch, with the cracked drywall around it, inexpertly painted by her or Andrew, she could not remember. Staggering back into the bedroom, she felt for the mattress and let herself fall onto it.

“Ow!” said Andrew. “This is me here. I exist.”

“I’m dizzy,” she said.