On Monday morning, Josephine got dressed for work. She stood in the bathroom with Joseph. There was a row of plants on the rim of the bathtub, bamboo and other things. As they brushed their teeth they made bug-eyed faces at each other in the mirror. She was absorbed enough in the face-making that it was a moment before she noticed the pitiful state of her eyes, her skin. She spat.
She was dressed for work. It seemed that she was going to go to work. It seemed that she was going to sit down at her desk, enter her password into the Database, reach for a file from the hill of files.
But she lingered as he put on his coat.
“You coming?” he said.
“I need a few more minutes,” she said. “Go ahead without me.”
He hugged her, but breezily, and was gone. She stood, unmoving. She was going to go to work. She ran to the door, about to yell for him—wait for me, I’m ready. But something caught her eye when she opened the door: THIRD DELIVERY ATTEMPT FAILED.
Tempt paled.
Lent ailed.
She yanked the postal notice off the door, ripped it in half, separating the JOSEPHINE from the NEWBURY. No one knew this latest address.
* * *
Walking in the park, Josephine tried to imitate a happy person, a satisfied, relaxed, competent person strolling in a park, but she kept having the sensation of people staring at her. A small girl with a soccer ball. A skinny woman whose black pit bull strained against its leash. The frightening old men who dared fish in the city pond. All staring at her, or so it seemed, with brazen judgment, as though they knew she was not where she was supposed to be. As though someone had instructed them to keep an eye on her.
Because the Database had abused her eyes, the swans looked to her like big white irascible blurs. A baby sitting on the grass in a red coat was actually a fire hydrant; a spaniel’s face was actually a spaniel’s behind.
She feared the pit bull chasing its squeaky toy that shrieked like a human when trapped between canine jaws.
A group of schoolchildren swarmed the paved path; their exhausted teacher pointed them toward the exit. “But we didn’t even get the chance to get lost!” a girl protested.
Josephine fled the paved path for a dirt trail leading toward the innards of the park. She passed trees tagged with graffiti. Discarded soda cans, used condoms, dirty napkins, ragged spiderwebs, squirrels more anxious than usual.
She almost stepped on a matted mash of twigs and feathers twisted at bizarre angles, an appalling object, difficult to look at. Only a sicko would gape, attempt to sort it out, weigh in on one side or the other—a fallen nest or the aftermath of a death?
She came to yellow police tape boxing in the area between three trees, but the space was empty. No blood, no sign of anything.
She hadn’t even brought her phone.
She stood eyeing the police tape until a father carrying his young daughter on his shoulders strolled past. “I can’t even tell what you’re pointing at,” he was saying to her, almost scornfully. “Are you pointing at the trees? What, you want us to go and live in these woods and be savages?”
Josephine hurried away from the police tape, emerged out of the woods onto a lawn covered in grazing geese. The geese began to stride in her direction, hissing.
She escaped onto a path lined with cattails.
Scat tit.
At ails.
A row of dead cats all hung up by their tails.
A man and woman in business attire passed in front of her, talking loudly and walking quickly. The man was saying, “and we’ll live by a lake. We’ll have a boat. A rowboat.” The woman looked tired. There was a stain on her cream-colored blouse. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she kept saying, maybe sarcastically.
And then, on the way out of the park, a mouse in the middle of the road, practically two-dimensional now, its mouth frozen open in a scream.
* * *
She wouldn’t let the geese win. She would be brave; she would go to the grocery store like a normal person. She would buy food. She would cook food. She would talk to him. Tell him everything. They would make a plan. As they always had.
She walked and walked and eventually came to a grocery store with a filthy yet friendly yellow awning and a tower of pomegranates out front. She didn’t know whether pomegranates should be selected based on firmness or fragrance or hue.
Poor me granite.
Pagan remote.
Page tame no.
She grabbed three at random, and a few vegetables, a box of spaghetti, a chunk of Parmesan. The cashier’s collar was crooked, the left side jutting upward. Filled with pity, Josephine averted her eyes.
Back at the sublet by the highway entrance ramp, a number of the plants seemed to be dying. There was a text from her mother: All okay in big bad city? The bed was unmade and the laundry ungathered. Enigmatic odors arose from the trash can. In the kitchen, mice had already replaced the piles of turds Joseph wiped away this morning. She found it impossible to be fastidious nowadays. She filled a glass and watered a few of the limpest plants. Had they been given any watering instructions? Had Joseph said something about that when she wasn’t listening? She felt guilty.
But she felt bold too, as she sliced the garlic, as she turned on the gas, warmed the kitchen, that soothing smell of boiling pasta. She laid it out, this hard-won dinner, on the battered coffee table. He would be home any second now. She would hand him a beer; he would sink beside her into the stranger’s stained couch. They would eat dinner and then go to the movies or some other normal human activity. She couldn’t wait. She smiled. She stared at the door.