Trousers and tunic are ruined and filthy. The pajamas she’d pulled her clothes over have literally saved her skin. Belly, chest, and buttocks are unscathed. Thighs, hands, and forearms are red, rough, and stinging. She turns on the shower, then, too weak to stand, lowers her protesting body into the pathetic excuse for a bathtub.

Hot water washes the blood from her hands and leg. The wound above her knee gapes like a little red mouth drooling pink. The cut is about an inch long and probably that deep. Had she still been a citizen of the so-called civilized world, she would get stitches.

She could sew it closed with cotton thread and a needle. The very idea makes her insides quiver.

Having dried herself as best she can, she closes the wound with four butterfly bandages. Half a roll of toilet paper wrapped around her leg and tied snugly with a scarf, knot over the wound, serves as a bandage, keeping the whole jury-rigged mess in place.

Body close to exhaustion but mind racing, Rose puts on a tank top and loose linen pants. The glove and the knife have got to be retrieved. They are evidence. Besides, she doesn’t want some neighborhood cat getting hold of the mutilated glove and dropping it proudly at the feet of an unsuspecting householder.

Rose limps outside.

The two items are artistically displayed on the white gravel, spattered now with black splotches, a gold mine of criminal DNA. If the Charlotte police are anything like the New Orleans police, they don’t cotton to all that CSI nonsense, just shoot suspects and work lucrative private security details.

Several feet from the knife lies the glove, her final stab has nearly severed the leather forefinger. What remains is attached only by the thinnest strip of black. Grimacing with distaste, she pinches it up. There is a lump in the dangling tip. A finger. Rose cut the intruder’s index finger clear off; that’s why his hand slipped free of the glove. A wave of revulsion rocks her. She doesn’t drop the gory object. Evidence. One day she might need it, not to prove the intruder’s guilt but to prove the entire incident was not a figment of an overheated delusion.

Glove in one hand, knife held gingerly in the other, Rose limps back through the shattered sliding glass door and into the kitchen. Trusting the neighbors to be as disinterested in illumination as they are in noise, she risks flipping on the lights.

Knife and glove laid on the counter, Rose contemplates her next move. She supposes she is in shock, supposes she’s lost a lot of blood, supposes she has PTSD. All this is probably true, but her mind is running at high speed, the manic side of depression. A treat. She’s suffered depression on and off for forty years, but never mania. If this is it, she is all for it.