“I’ll let you know,” she said, cutting herself off with the sharp closing of the door. She stopped herself from watching to see the direction he would turn.

If it weren’t for the children—

She rummages through the paint box, knocking its contents against the scuffling cardboard. The rubber gloves she’s sure she bought at the paint store aren’t in the box, and she knows she hasn’t any in the kitchen. She can’t find a hammer or tape. Everything’s gone. Whatever there was, it’s been lost. She rolls up the sleeves of her old shirt and starts to pry the metal top off the heavy can of white paint with a kitchen knife. The metal plate wedges upward at a tilt, and she flips it by its edge onto the newspaper.

She peers into the cylindrical can as if down a well. Linseed oil has separated from the pigment, leaving a fatty yellow slick on the opaque surface. She dips the end of a coarse pine stick into the can and begins to stir in the oil. The paint gleams wetly, coating the sides of the flat stick and folding back upon itself as she stirs. Viscous, it sucks the stick. Air she’s stirred into the paint rises through the thick liquid, tumbling up in bubbled lozenges, then bursts on the glossy surface like the gasses of a sulfur spring, the paint splattering in droplets and slowly melting in.

The thick of it. A drip, slow over the lip of the can. A bitter scent pinches in her nose, a sulfuric burn. Stranded—with this appalling loneliness. This greasy slick, this blank to fill. There are the bodies: whitened, oily and vaporous. Fornicating, grinding like demons. A tangle of legs and elbows, a butcher’s bin of offal. Awful—this suck of vulgarity, these extra parts crowding the ones that are missing. A hip, a hip and a knee cocked, a sheet—twisted and soaked, folding back into itself, drag heavy, caught between them. A gagging stink of perfume, of nail enamel, of paint that conceals how filthy it all really is—his cock slipping against her, his knee, their skin a slick nothing sticks to, certainly not the truth. The bone of it, the meat and the salt. Here it comes. Faster. Their faces shove up to the surface, up out of the paint—their eyes closed, lids bulging, mouths gaping, like death masks, like wax castings, melted yellow, oozing at the edges, fused. It’s a mistake, a horror show.

The images flicker, grotesque, refracted on the vaulted surface of her stinging eyes. She rakes the box for a paintbrush and plunges it into the can. Each stiff bristle sinks individually, breaking the surface. A bed of nails. A torture. She lifts them, masked in white.