That is why they want to break me: because I see. The theatre of stealth they enact is just that—theatre . . . designed to exhaust me, so that I forfeit my vision. I should stand from the cigarette-scarred table, walk away from their performance. But my friend is dying, and I’d sooner die than leave her. Marie smiles at me with lips turning the color of lead. She sips coffee with a mouth that should soon go into rictus, and I ache to kiss her mouth and say a true good-bye. “So, I’m doing better,” she says. That she means it twists a flat blade in my heart. She runs her thumb along her cup while her eyes film, as if skins peeled from eggshells are pressed upon her irises. She has always met my eyes with her stone-deep gaze, and that is one reason I’ve always loved her. I should take the hand that has left her cup and now rests on the table beside a profession of love knife-etched into the wood years ago. But I’m afraid of what I’d feel under her skin, that the feeling would brim my vision, that I would flinch at the touch of loose skin sliding over bone.
