A chair scraping across the floor. Footsteps. Dishes clanking. The ebb and flow of familiar voices. Mike was getting the kids ready for school, a respite for which she had not needed to ask him. A bright seam of light joined the curtains where they fell loosely together. Alice felt starved for darkness and quiet and rest. All night she had lain here, her brain grinding up the spent truth of Lauren’s brutal death. Assembling and dissembling it. Adding lurid colors and dimensions that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Seeing the knife and the bloody fleshy parting of Lauren’s skin and muscle. The exposure of her bone. Seeing it. Ivy curled inside her mother for the last time. Shocked by the sensation of air against her newborn skin. The ratchet of her first cry as it hurled into a deaf universe. Without love, who would hear her? What did they suffer, those two females, as they were forced out of and into the world? And Alice asked herself: If fear was a giant wave overcoming me, what would I do?
