Angela lives in a house on W. 83rd St. Angela is thirty-one. She has mid-length brown hair. She’s on the taller side of average, and her face is relatively thin. The house is large, and quiet. It has a dark wood interior. Many windows let cold light enter. Angela lives in the house, and it is autumn.
Angela wakes for three hours in the night, between two and five am. She feels small motions beneath her duvet, traces of touch–things we ignore. She sleeps for one last hour, then wakes again to her gentle alarm. She quiets the alarm and spends the ten-minute rest trying to open her eyes in the dark, repeats this once, then rises, dresses, and eats cereal with a banana. In the garage, in her car, she starts the engine. Dave and Ryan In The Morning greet her. A young woman sings about denying her ex-lover in a club. It’s a dance track. Angela opens the garage door. Angela reverses and leaves.
The house is quiet. Appliances form a chorus: the refrigerator’s whine, the muted television’s insect pitch, the ventilation’s pitchless rush. They blend into a sourceless ringing.
A family of mice nests in the wall between the garage and house. They scutter on the concrete slab left vacant and slightly warm by the car. They find no crumbs there. In the kitchen, Angela has left several flakes of blended grain strayed about the table. They eat them.
*
Angela pulls into the garage. There is still light; some of it falls in and touches the dark concrete. Angela listens to loud static from the radio. She unlatches the door. She begins to step out and realizes the car is still in gear and lurching forward. She parks. She stops the engine. She gets out.
Inside, the last bright blueness fills the windows. Angela looks at it. She smiles, then thinks of night and turns the lights on. They form a thin film against the exterior.
Angela will make stir fry. She leaves chicken thawing in a bowl. She puts her hands on the counter. The sourceless chorus of appliances rings. She unmutes the television. In the
intervals between episodes she sees herself in the blackened screen.
She returns to the kitchen. The chicken opalesces bluely. There are no bones. She sets the breasts in the pan and then cuts vegetables. She finds mouse droppings on the counter.
*
In the night, Angela wakes. She does not check the time. She waits. She feels tickles in the sheets, things the mind paints easily as insects. Best to ignore. Pale, flaccid light enters from the street. It leaves uneven shades on the ceiling. They puddle in corners. She watches lines thrum.
She gets out of bed. She walks to the window. A single fluorescent streetlight is bright on the curb. It shows black tarmac and empty lawns. It weakly illuminates faces of other unlit houses.
She returns to bed, restless, then falls asleep.
*
She wakes to her gentle alarm and tells it to wait. She struggles with it in ten-minute intervals. She pours cereal poorly. She sloshes milk, opalescing bluely. When Angela leaves, the house is empty. A rug is there. Lamps stand. Appliances ring.
Eventually the mice enter, together, and then drift, straying into separate corners. They vocalize intermittently. They convene, again, on the pale granite counter, to eat cereal, together.
*
Angela returns. Night comes more quickly today. She has little time to turn the lights on but does. She eats chickpeas from a can on her L-sectional. She watches videos on the internet: homesteaders, beavers, knot-tying. She watches more videos about knot-tying. There’s no rope for practice. She finds an extension cord in the garage and winds a slip-knot into it. She feels it run into and out of itself. She pauses her video. She stands at the ceiling fan. She sits. She winds the other end into a slip-knot. She stands and opens the knot’s mouth to swallow the fan and the other mouth hangs, open, into the room. She looks at it. She puts her beans down.
She walks to the fridge. Inside is a cold glow and celery stalks, and stiff fries. She puts the celery and fries on a plate with mayonnaise. She remembers–from her bag she pulls and sets mousetraps. The mouth hangs. She approaches the staircase with her plate of stiff fries, and celery stalks. In the wall by the staircase, there is hair. It is black. Angela pulls at it. It’s a clump, of hair in the wall. She pulls. It’s long. She holds it.
She looks at it. There is more hair in the wall. She pulls it; it does not stop. She looks at the clot of hair in her hand. She drops it.
She eats stiff fries in bed.
*
She wakes to a massive noise, a broken dam of sound, and then a return to silence. She does not move; she cuts her breathing. The streetlight paints stained glass on her walls, translucent blues laid strange to each other and overlapping into something less and more than pattern: shadowed lattice, lace curtain, facet angles of the same shape overlaid in competing composites. It holds her. An insect bites. No. What sound then nothing. She cuts her breath. Appliances ring.
*
She wakes and finds herself holding a redness on her thigh. Long scratch marks run from knee to hamstring. She licks her hand. She rubs saliva into her skin. She gets out of bed and knocks the plate of congealed mayonnaise to the floor and it’s loud. She covers the redness with clothing.
Her feet stick on the wooden stairs. She moves for her cereal. She finds a mouse’s spine broken beneath metal. A small amount of blood leaks from its mouth onto the cheap wood. Feces stain its anal fur. She lifts it to her belly button. She looks at it. She looks across her counter and sees the extension cord hanging. She looks at the house around her. She looks over her shoulders. She walks to the cord. She puts her head in its mouth. She looks at the mouse. She looks at the house around her. Then she gets down. She throws the mouse and trap together in the garbage. She carries it out to the garage. She leaves her cereal on the counter.
She arrives home late with a man. He carries an open bottle of wine from the car into the kitchen and begins looking for glasses. He turns from cupboards towards the counter to pour, and sees the extension cord, hanging. He pauses. He holds a glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. Angela comes in, drunk. She kisses him wetly on the neck. She empties his hands. She kisses him wetly on the face and undoes his belt and he lifts her dress to touch her. She takes out his cock and holds it. He lifts her and enters her and carries her to the couch, where he fucks her, and she enjoys it, and from her back looks past his mouth to the other, above them, and he touches her; he presses lightly in circles and his fingers are cold but not unpleasantly and she is caught feeling as she looks at its gaping and comes, with smothered noises. She looks at him, her features unfixed. He thrusts. The sound of his insistence briefly fills the house, slaps off its walls, and she waits beneath him. He comes onto her belly with a sound of struggle, and it’s over. She looks at archipelagos of semen and her face reels. He sees. He speaks to her. She speaks back. He stands and collects a paper towel and wipes her. She unclenches. She covers herself with a cushion. He speaks; she mutters. He pulls his underwear over himself. She sinks further into the couch. He speaks. He asks a question. He leaves.
She sleeps there. The residue crusts and binds her weakly to the cushion.
*
She wakes to the sound of the heat drying her throat, her lips. She fumbles in the dark for the thermostat. She does not find it. She turns the fan on, and returns to the couch, and something hard hits her in the back of the head and then it hits her again harder and she grabs blindly and misses and it his her again hard in the eye and she stops; she crouches and waits. She waits. She holds her eye. She hears it circling. She freezes. She crawls on hands and knees to the wall. She throws the switches; lights rip on; the fan slows. She grabs the cord with both hands and pulls. The fan blades lurch. One comes down at an angle and she pulls again. It all pitches heavily. She stops. She stands on the coffee table. She slowly undoes its specifics. She lets it drop.
She stands naked in the center of the house. Appliances ring.
Recommended Reading: As I Lay Dying and Emily Dickinson, Joyelle McSweeney and the Greek tragedians, Aeschylus especially, and Joy Williams, and Richard Wright, and Cormac.
