She’s ruined, gray and mottled as something gone very bad, her head and gut full of the foulest, most unthinkable garbage. No, her head is full of pulsating, metallic rot; her gut is utterly emptied, gagged to the last fleck, down to her scraped-out bare toes. She has been sick all night, clutching the porcelain rim of the toilet, virally poisoned, retching, weaving fever dreams, her unhinged mind rambling over weird, ghastly scenes. Snails crawling over the bathroom walls wearing the faces of Ted and that woman, their sluggish moist tracks glistening on the tiles. Their sidelong eye-slide of lies, their miniaturized fear of tumbling into the foamy acrid soup in the commode. Or she and Frieda and Nicholas a rick of bones, heaped together on the dusty bedclothes, discovered months from now by the two leasing agents in their matching dark suits and bowlers, their twin faces verdigris’d as the faces of undertakers. She sprawled, convulsing, on the relievedly cold floor in the loo, Nicholas and Frieda unaware and dead to the world upstairs, exhausted themselves from their own influenza ordeals, collapsed on her bed, the mattress of which she managed to drag—how? by what superhuman effort?—onto the floor of the nursery in the morning. And lay there all day, sipping water from a cup, shivering and sweating, the babies tossing and muttering beside her, taking turns in their cots. She lay immobilized, flinching at the sound of the children’s penetrating, mosquitoey voices.

Night, again, has ground itself around. She has made it all the way downstairs, shaky, sallow, barefoot, in her nightgown, each step an excruciating jolt to her frangible head, with her wastepaper bin from the kitchen and a note for the nappy service man. In a sudden, brief spasm of clarity, Sylvia’s remembered that the rubbish truck comes Monday morning and so will the nappy man. She hasn’t the strength for two round trips down the staircase to the entrance hall, one with the trash and one with the heavy, awkward diaper pail, though the flat reeks of rotting rubbish and all the week’s diapers are used up, the children bare bottomed. It is beyond all human comprehension that she might even attempt to rinse the stinking nappies. But she has switched off the stairway light to spare her eyes, her blinding headache a blacksmith’s anvil banging and sparking her brainpan, and she has tacked her note to the house’s front door, asking the nappy man to ring and wait while she brings the soileds down in the morning. In the phosphorescent glow of the moon beaming a shard of bluish light through the front door transom, Sylvia tamps her trash into the mysteriously full bin behind her pram, under the dark stairwell.

“What are you doing with my rubbish bin?”