“Oh,” I say. I look back at the puppet; it’s remarkable how the light from my phone screen has transformed her expression—she’s definitely smiling, maybe even laughing, at me now. “You actually want me to come down?”

“I think that would be best, considering the situation.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay, great. Thank you, Lydia. We will see you then.”

I hang up.

I lie back down on the floor. I find a comfortable position, my arm at an odd angle but relaxed, my legs twisted around each other, and then I rock myself.

Sometimes, I still feel like a kid. In positions like this, I can close my eyes and imagine myself back into my bed, and I can imagine my body back into the tiny body I had at age four, and I can tuck myself into my old Snoopy duvet and imagine the sag in the mattress that told me, even though my eyes were closed, where my mum was sitting on my bed. Sometimes, despite everything she said, I’m sure she saw me as entirely human. She used to watch me sleep, sometimes—which I know because, usually, I wasn’t actually asleep but just pretending and, while I listened to her breathing, was in fact imagining that she was human: that we were normal like my friends at school and their parents; that we didn’t have to hate parts of ourselves in order to keep living in society; that in the morning, Mum would have breakfast—toast with butter, an egg standing up in an egg cup, a cup of orange juice—ready for me. Instead, it was pig blood, yet again and again and again and again in the mornings, in my usual Totoro mug, which was shaped like his body and had a lid to keep the blood warm that was his scalp with his little ears pointing up. At some point, I realized that our feeling of difference wasn’t really fair, since humans ate eggs, essentially the menstruation of birds—a type of life-giving thing just as any blood is.

I pick up the puppet and look at her, her face now in its usual neutral expression. I turn onto my side. The puppet is lying with her head on my arm, facing the same way as me so she can see my phone screen. I open YouTube and search for “What I eat in a day,” my go-to when I’m stressed. There are lots of suggestions for more specific search terms.

What I eat in a day model

What I eat in a day to lose weight

What I eat in a day to gain weight

What I eat in a day fruitarian

What I eat in a day Japanese

What I eat in a day vegan

What I eat in a day Korean

What I eat in a day ed recovery

What I eat in a day teen