I am lying on my side in the dark and I can feel that Mssr is nearly home. It has never taken this long before and the next minute simply will not come. My sheets are stained and smell of filth—there are black streaks of ink that have gone straight through to the mattress from nights I’ve fallen asleep with a pen in hand. He should be home by now, he must be home so I can fall asleep. I am on my side and staring at the darkest corner of the room and it’s as if I can feel little insects boring their way through me, a few dozen or so, straight out the mattress and into my flesh, slipping between the slats of my ribs. My skin closes up behind them and I can feel them rattle around in the big hollow inside. I take big long breaths to shake them around and I hear them ring like dry grains of rice poured into a pot. If I hold my breath maybe I can suffocate them but I believe I would die first. I would wretch them out of me but I cannot move because if I move then Mssr will never come home. So I lay here with these things stuck inside me and I wait. When I hear the key turn in the door I let out a short sharp howl like a dog and close my eyes. Mssr comes into the room and I pretend to sleep. He turns on the lights and turns them off again. The people have made me very sad lately. The other day, just around the corner from Mssr’s apartment—I must stay within a few blocks of that place or I will simply come undone—a man on the street ruined me. He didn’t do a thing, he was simply very ugly and all alone and it made me feel awful, like I was watching a bomb go off in my hand. He was walking in front of me and I looked at the back of his head till I cried. When he turned back to me I shielded my eyes like a child who finds blindness easier than staring into the dark. I was frozen like that, my eyes buried in the crook of my arm, the other arm extended out as if it were begging him to stop, my mouth pulled down. But in a moment he was gone and I could breathe again and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Nothing has ever happened to me. Mssr tells me this over his breakfast one morning, a meal that I have failed to make for him once again. He is already eating by the time I wake up and I come into the kitchen half-dressed, a meager and wordless apology I make only for him. He does not look at me. To me it sounds as if it’s raining so I press my face to the window but there is nothing but sun and sky out there. Not a drop. He tells me to get away from the window, that there are neighbors out there. I sit at the table and cover my chest with folded arms. I try to ask him about his day but in only a few seconds he has gone far past my depth. I do not understand how a job like his works, what he does or where he goes, what I am supposed to do while he’s gone. Mssr sees this in my face and puts his fork down. That is when he tells me about the nothing, the one thing that has ever happened to me, of absolutes and lack. I can’t think of anything to say back to him and I guess it means that he is right and it will always be this way. I cannot stand to be alive during the spring. Ever since I was a child it has repelled me. I shrink away from it, the Aprils and Mays or my life. The bugs come back and the air goes yellow and cloudy and everything in me gets spit up in the sink in balls of green phlegm that come from my throat and my eyes. I can’t bear to be seen like this so I stay inside instead. Mssr must travel for a full month before June comes, that has always been the case, and it becomes a test to see if I am still real. I am preparing to find out if I am real. He will leave on Monday, before the sun rises, we are to get dinner the night before, somewhere that is much too far for me but I will smile and I will go. The collar of my shirt will be too stiff and I will smoke on the walk there. I never smoke. Mssr will order for both of us, I will only eat whatever he is eating. I will drink more than I should. I’ll think about stabbing the waiter in the stomach with my fork. Everyone will look at me and it will be unbearable and hot and rotten. We will be home by eleven. Mssr will sleep on the couch because I move too much at night and I will whine like a little dog after he closes the door. I will stay awake as if there is glass beneath my eyelids and to close them for a second would mean a life of total blindness. At the very moment when I let my guard down, just for a minute of rest, he will disappear, a phone number on the table, and I will not exist anymore. Monday, I am no more. I wake up and the skin of my hands looks like my grandmother’s, like a wrinkled sheet of parchment paper, stained and burned. It is hot, the bed is wet, and I can barely open the windows; the pieces of wood must have stuck together after winter’s thaw. I give up after I pry open an inch of air and bring my face to the small gap. The street looks so strange from here, as if the whole world could exist beyond a keyhole. I can see it so clearly, as if Mssr has locked me up in some far away tower so high up that the clouds are below me, that entire cities appear like pebbles on the shore line. I want to write all this down somewhere but I am tired and can never remember where my pens are. So I sit with my head bent along the windowsill until the stiffening pain is distracting enough for me to forget it all. I go to the kitchen but I do not want to eat a thing, not now, not ever again. I fashion myself as an ugly girl from Sienna, I will starve myself, I will choke on twigs, I will spit down my front and they will all love it. They will clap and tell me that God really must love me the most. It is almost evening now. It sounds like it is raining again. It only takes a few days for me to die. I can’t imagine that I’ve ever been allowed to be alone, everytime it happens I am seized by evil, dirty feelings. They fill me up so tightly that I am sure there could be room for nothing else inside me. And that is when I decide that I am dead, that I must have already died, for there is nothing else in me but waste and destruction. The house is a mess already, there is food in the sink and clothes on the ground and the smell of stale beer and spit. If I am capable of such havoc all around me, what annihilation could I be bringing down upon my inside at this very moment? It is like a disease, or like the bugs again, and I cannot believe that I am breathing. I lay down on the floor, naked, and lay a piece of paper across my face. I breathe hard, I try to make the paper move but it has stuck to the sweat on my face, it is caught against the cracking skin of my lips. Suddenly I am choking and I am sure there is a man in the room, looking at me, doing this to me, and I tear myself free of the silly paper and sit straight up, screaming with whatever is left inside me. But there is no one there and perhaps the bugs have made their way into my throat and eaten it all up because not a sound will come out of there anymore. I look at myself in the mirror, mouth open like a fish, noiseless and dumb, alone in the dark. When I was much younger, on some shore of some lake with some family whose names I will never be able to remember, there was a dock that had been roped off for the children’s safety. It swung in the water like a hammock, and if you got close enough, you could see that the pillings that had been drilled into the sand beds had begun to rot from the inside and were filling with water. All that was left was a thin retaining wall, perhaps half an inch, of water-logged, flaking wood. The sight of it made me nauseous, the green and soggy wood, the water trapped inside, and I cried when I first saw it. There were two boys who lived next door and they kicked the air with laughter when they saw the tears I shed over the dock. They would come to the shore when I was alone and drop ladybugs and caterpillars down the pit inside of the wooden post. I would scream, my eyes would roll back wildly, and one of the boys would have to cover my mouth while the other kept killing things in front of me. Eventually, they dragged me to the water and took my small, screaming hand and shoved it down the hole in the dock. I made noises I will never be able to make again. The walls of the pillings were soft as sand, and my fingers, kicking wildly, pushed through the wood like the flesh of an over-ripe peach. A few days later, I pretended to marry one of the boys. We kissed the night before I left and he gave me a tiny piece of paper with a mailing address. I folded it over itself once and then again and watched it float off across the lake. I am practicing my stories this week. No one ever understands them, when I speak they stare at my mouth in disgust as if an earthworm has begun to snake its way through my teeth. I will try to make it better, for myself and for everyone. Me and Mssr are at dinner, it is months ago, the heat of winter, and the table is crowded with strangers and food I will not eat. I try to keep up with their clever witticisms, with the pitch of the laughter but I can only fill my mouth with wine instead of words. But a few slip out. I have a glass in one hand and a fork with the other, a rare piece of lamb is dangling off it, and suddenly I am talking about the dead swans in the park last fall and the way their necks hung around the cement lip of the pond like clothes hangers and the way the governess tied her bonnet around the eyes of her young student who tore the cloth off and laughed at the dead birds. And I am telling everyone how I find it strange that a whole city could move on from something so strange without as much as a question, with simply a shrug and swift exhale through the nostrils. And I am saying that this is what war will look like in a hundred years, not atomic bombs or leveled countries but harmlessly dead animals and children who laugh at them. But then my glass is empty and no more words are coming out and across the table Mssr is folding his napkin into the shape of something he will kill me with. The table is quiet as the last course comes out. I do not speak for three days after and Mssr works late every night. If a week has gone by, there is no way for me to know. I realize this and I am incredibly upset, and soon enough I am convinced that Mssr is never coming back, that it has been years already, that I’ve been tricked. I unfold the paper on the dining room table and dial the phone number. I can’t tell if the last number is four or a nine and I begin to weep, I pick four, weeping all the while as it rings. A woman picks up and I speak to her with extreme callousness, in a tone I will feel terribly guilty about this evening. She transfers the call to Mssr. His voice does not sound the way I thought it would and I cannot believe it is truly him. I ask what I wore when we first met. He sounds incredibly sad but he answers correctly which makes me very happy; I wipe the sweat from my forehead and pull my legs under me. I ask him to tell me how long it's been, if he will ever come back and he sounds sad again, he tells me that there is a calendar, that I should use it, that it's hardly been a week in a half. I tell him that there’s no need for such things because he will always tell me the truth. It is quiet for some time. Mssr tells me to go to sleep and so I listen. I am going outside today because it finally rained. The ashtray I left on the railing of the fire escape filled with water and fell down to the pavement while I slept. It rained so I am putting on clothes for an hour, layering and stripping and pulling and tearing. Everything I ever picked for myself makes me look like a trout caught in a dirty old net. I resign, I wrap myself in Mssr’s blue rain jacket and lock the door behind me. Out there it is not the same city as it was two weeks ago. Everyone is looking down or into the cups of their palms, everyone is alone and no one speaks. The street feels narrower, a baby cries and everyone cranes their neck to stare. The mother blushes, they disappear into an alley, no one says a word. It's as if I’ve found my way into a reflection, stuck on the other side of a mirror. Maybe this is just what’s good enough for me. I buy more wine, the man at the counter does not look at me, he stares as if there is someone behind me in line but there is no one. It is just us in the whole store and I think of all the horrible things he could do to me that no one would ever know about, that no one would ever believe. I try to give him exact change, to be easier for him, but I miscount, I drop a bill that is far too large in his hand and run away. I am walking in a circle around Mssr’s apartment and I imagine crowding the whole of my life around the bathtub, trapping the image of it all on the surface of the water. Would it stay there forever, without a sound, beating on against the ceramic walls? Maybe if it all came together, even for just a moment, I could make it last forever. I think of how beautiful it would look, stretched across the skin of the bath, shimmering and twitching. At first, I believed an ocean or a pond would be better, but my life could never pretend to hold such volume. I can happily settle for an eternity spent kneeling on the bathroom floor, my head buried in warm water. I could fit everyone in if they were all alright with touching each other, just a bit. My mother, my first English professor, the nurse who set my broken arm, the man who euthanized the family dog. They’re all here, drowning, smiling, staring back at me. I want to touch them all, hold their faces, but I know that it would ruin everything, that a beautiful image will shatter if I try to make myself a part of it. It occurs to me, somewhere between the night that is today and the morning that will make it some other time, that I would like to go away for a while. A few years ago, Mssr tried to take us to the coast for a weekend and I made myself so sick over a particular bathing suit that I could not find that we just stayed home instead. We opened the windows and filled the bath with cold water and drank warm red wine for two days. But this time I know it will be different. If I could only get out of this city how much would change. We could go inland for a change, to a big mountain that stretches past my eyes, one that makes trees look like blades of grass. I would even settle for a hill. Somewhere without stone, without water, somewhere safer. It would make it all go much smoother, I’m sure of it. I write all this down so I will remember it clearly, formally, once Mssr has returned home to me. I will give it to him like a gift. We will get out of this place together. This the easiest way to imagine him coming home, by picturing our immediate escape together, on the back of a grey mare, chased out of town, my arms wrapped around his chest, his body as firm as the trunk of a tree. I fall asleep easily. There is a terrible word I cannot remember, one that I’ve used three times in my life and let shatter the world around me. The first time it happened I had come home for the first time since I started university. I had taken myself to a restaurant I had walked by as a child but my mother had never taken me to. I sat at the bar and drank until an old man came up to me. He was a half-toothed stranger who said he remembered me. He stood behind me and said things I did not understand till I screamed a word that got me dragged out. They left me on the corner with a glass of water and told me not to worry about the bill. The second time I said it was the night I met Mssr. It was some banquet in the name of some philosopher who I had scarcely read a few chapters of. An old friend showed me off to table after table of men who disgusted me, and I answered their questions even when I did not understand them. Then someone got up on stage to speak and I stopped moving and threw up in a cocktail napkin. A caterer walked me outside and left me with a cigarette. Mssr was there too, asking a valet for a book of matches. I stared at him, his suit indistinguishable from the color of the pavement, and I muttered that word to myself over and over again until he looked at me. The third time was tonight. I took all my clothes off and used them to cover the mirror in the bathroom. I filled the sink, I plugged the drain up with a dirty towel. I shoved my head under the water and screamed that word until I had drank all the water and left my head resting on the porcelain. I leave the house again today and every man looks at me like I have slept with them before. Maybe I have because if I was really capable of such a thing there’s no way I would be able to remember it. The people here look at me as if they expect it to happen again at any moment they would like. And if they asked me instead of staring perhaps I would agree. I wonder what would be easier, to blind every one of them in this city or to cut out my own eyes. I sit at the foot of a bridge and try to find an answer but it is hot out and people are constantly walking over me and I fear that they can tell what I’m considering doing to them. I press my legs together and turn around, I face the stone wall of the bridge and heave my breaths against it. I imagine that if I breathe hard enough the whole thing will collapse and everyone will disappear into the river below and it will be quiet again and they will stop looking. But this is just a wish, just a dream, and those are silly things, not worth anything. Nothing will ever happen, not because of me. I am not capable of making anything real.