Pot at a boil, kitchen steam, onion dice, blade—

This is silent astonishment, Sylvia pale at her butcher block, the knife dropped as if burning, clattering, the tip of her thumb sliced off. The baby still beats his tray, the two-days’ nanny takes her handheld tour of the toy box.

Blanching, her face and her thumb, and sensation held in suspense: no pain, no fear, no shock. Twilight itches the windows. Church bells go off like a clock.

And then the blood comes. Oozing red, seeping up to the surface, dark and bright and thick, welling at the sheared top of her thumb without spilling, a shiny crimson dome engorged and rising, and then the flood.

And then the flood. Twenty-eight days—a phase of the moon, the agony drag. The spurt, the pad, the jangling belt. The dangling flap to hide in her skirt. She was bloody, cursed and dirty, answered the door on moon-day to her pretty young nurse, a fat pad snagged to elastic between her legs. Hardly dressed for a week. Cramping gut, cramping womb, her head hot, and her lungs a rattling muck. Oh, her lungs, they hurt.

They hurt, the twenty-eight days since his cruel desertion, a month of mothering her fatherless son. One last chance: in Ireland, but he cut it off. He cut her dead.

Blood is running down her wrist. She pulls back the sleeve of her blouse. “Sue?” she calls to the young nurse, her new nanny, in the playroom. “Sue?” she calls, her voice distant and thin.

And what’s come since? The sleepless dark, and flu, and poetry: all she’s eaten, all she’s slept. Twenty-one poems in twenty-eight days. She’s burned through them, burned with fever, day after day, hit the mother lode, the richest vein. My god, think—it’s the real red thing.

Sue, glimpsed through the doorway, is smiling, laughing, her head at an endearing tilt, on her hip on the red rug with Frieda. A felted duck, a squeaky cat in her lap, a pile of grubby dollies at her knees. Nicholas bounces in a walker, crowing, banging his block. Sue’s head turns frame by frame: in the kitchen Sylvia’s slim, elegant arm is held up like a jewelry model’s, blood cascading off her elbow, flush upon flush.

The relief of blood—the ache, the break of tension. Something came loose, slipped free—

Sue stands, saying something mild to Frieda, who turns back to the toy box to dig. Sue stops in the kitchen, presses Sylvia’s right forefinger to the nearly severed flap of skin at the top of her cut thumb, asks where to find bandages and iodine. Blood is pooling in the chopped onions.