I glance down at the veins on my arms. Some are a kind of pink color; others are a light-ish blue-green. I’m reminded of the two eels I saw in my mind and the scene they parted to reveal. I try to think about Ben’s question, but I find it difficult to think about my mum. My mum, who I’ve tried so hard to live apart from, who has felt like a dead weight I am cursed to have hanging around my neck for my whole life, pulling me down, preventing me from living fully. When I’d lied to Ben and told him that my mum was dead, I didn’t feel too bad because she sees herself as dead anyway, and because maybe I did then too. But in my dream, under the threat of true death, she had seemed more alive than ever, more alive than all the humans in the world, who in that reality had been reduced to bones and ash. Ben has a pained, sympathetic expression on his face.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” he says. He puts the lid on the Dairylea box. In the time he has been over here, he’s finished all of the remaining triangles.

“I guess—” I start to say.

I guess I do miss my mum. When I was small, I fitted completely on her lap, my feet just reaching her knees when my legs were straight out, and my head interlocking perfectly with the little nook under her chin, my face in the perfect position for her to kiss when I turned around. She made me hate an intrinsic part of myself but I don’t think she ever hated me. She used to tell me how much she loved watching me grow. “When you were a baby,” she said, “I stayed up all night every night to watch you just in case I missed something about you changing.” When I was around nine, she told me that she wished she could make my childhood last forever, so she could watch me grow up—becoming taller, becoming stronger, becoming womanlier, becoming more assertive and independent—for her whole life. When I stopped changing, when I stopped becoming and was just a stagnant thing that had become everything it could become, my mum drifted away from me. She stopped caring, it seemed, stopped showing me that she loved me and, in fact, made me feel the opposite, as if, now my body was as unchanging as hers, I could no longer represent goodness to her. “I guess I do miss my mum,” I say.