At the bottom of the stairs, I stop and look down at myself, surprised to see that I still have a human body, surprised to see that my legs are moving like normal legs, surprised to see that I’m still putting one foot in front of the other. Upstairs, Ben is still in The Place. I can sense him again; I can sense everything about him. While I couldn’t hear his speech earlier, now I can hear his heart beating fast, his thumbs darting across his phone screen, sending a message. I think, also, amid the throbbing and beating, I can hear fragments of his thoughts. My name, and Maria’s—he’s texting Maria—and random words, help, and hospital, and sick, and teeth; and milk too—the milk from my hands is on his hands and he’s smelled it and recognized the smell. I can feel his body trembling. It’s shock, maybe. I can feel him shaking, and trying to control it, taking deep breaths, sitting down on a chair. He seems frightened, of me, maybe, or of the situation; either way, I realize that a part of me enjoys it and that realization, in turn, frightens me.

I slip into my studio. It’s dark inside. My room is still neat, the way I left it before I went up to The Place, Yaga in her strange human form on the canvas that is propped up against the wall, the real, puppet Yaga next to the painting, still strung up on the washing line I made, a little puddle on the table beneath her where the water from our shower has run off her hair. Joseph Beuys and his coyote are still up on the wall too; I’d forgotten that I’d put these pictures up—the coyote tearing at Beuys’s blanket in one picture, placid and looking out the window in the other.

I’m inside for only a few minutes before I sense Ben outside my studio door. He knocks, and then he says my name—my name, which doesn’t feel like it fits me anymore. “Lyd,” he says, and then some other words I can’t quite make out. And then, “Lyd, will you let me in?”

I sit down on the floor against the door. Through it, I can feel Ben’s circulatory system. All his veins, like vines, growing beautifully out of his heart. I can smell his blood, and it smells delicious and familiar and wholesome, as I imagine freshly baked bread smells to humans. I grope at the door with my hands, as though I could get some sort of sustenance through it. I could open the door very quickly. I know how easily I could snatch Ben from the other side. On this side of the door, it would just be me and him, while on that side, other people will be arriving soon—artists starting work for the day, and maybe even doctors too, if he has called someone and told them I need to be seen. But here, it would be just us. Just us, in the dark.