My mother’s stalker is not tall, not short. He wears black sunglasses and khaki shorts and a floral button-down. The flowers resemble bloodied fingers: nails gnawed off, skin sanded away, wands of bone exposed. My mother’s stalker drives a dust-colored sedan with four doors and a crumpled license plate. The first three digits are 79W. He shows me his penis through the front window, which is partially obscured by a camellia bush that my mother grooms diligently, severing the heads of the most vivid offspring for the vase on our kitchen table. Before that moment, I had thought a penis was a kind of zipper, a tab that could be tugged loose, parting the skin to reveal a stone recess where the statuette of an important person might stand. My mother’s stalker drives to our door even though he lives seven houses down, not in the direction of the neighbor with the broken-down truck that’s become a habitat for stray cats but in the direction of the neighbor who once tried to flatten her husband with a refrigerator and ended up dragging both to the curb, one of them no longer functioning, the other unworthy of mourning.

My mother says it’s important that we know her stalker as thoroughly as he knows us. “We have to stalk him twice as much as he’s been stalking me,” she says after the seventeenth time that he rings our doorbell past midnight.

The stalker’s strategy has been a gradual escalation: He followed my mother to and from work every couple of weeks. Then there was the nightly doorbell ringing, but only for a few days at a time. Handwritten notes like stray leaves on our doorstep. It’s the kind of stalking that lacks skin contact, that can’t congeal into a believable story or an imminently tragic conclusion, that can be dismissed as the paranoia of two women who live alone together. Only women are capable of occupying that oxymoron: alone together.

Rain adorns the sky the night my mother and I pursue her stalker. A fitting tribute: The stalker initially became known to us when his little white dog pissed in our front yard, the first rain our dirt had ever received directly. “She’s peeing, not pooping, I promise,” the stalker had said to my mother. She’d laughed and shrugged it off. “Your dog can shit anywhere she wants to. It’s fertilizer.” Later, she insisted to me that she’d never extended any invitation to intimacy. My mother never gives her name away, not even to me. We found out later that the local crows, those traitors, had littered her name all over the pavement. These crows committed this act of vengeance because my mother had once gone to war with their species. After they’d repeatedly uprooted her bushes, she’d carved blocks of foam into corvids, painted the decoys black and galactic blue, and scattered them in our front yard. According to her research, crows stayed away from their dead. A corpse was a cautionary tale, a sign of lethal danger. But the local crows were immune to her psychological tactics. In retaliation, they’d taken turns shitting on our window until the glass became opaque with droppings, and it had taken two weeks per pane to scrape off every calcified layer. We’d lived without light in the meantime, fumbling in the dark and walking into corners, since my mother was unwilling to waste electricity during the day.

“Those crows are still cawing my name,” my mother says, squinting out the window, unrestored to its original transparency. She turns to me and says that you never get to choose your enemies in this world.

We bring a flashlight that doubles as a club. We prance over the acidic cracks in the sidewalk, and in a few strides, we arrive at his house. He’s likely still at work. “What kind of work does he do?” I ask my mother, and she says that’s exactly the kind of thing we have to find out.

We know where he lives because he reminds us. His notes describe how much he wishes to visit, how close he feels to us already, how often he prays for us to banish our roof so that he might shine the knife of his hard light upon us. He writes “HELLO” in all caps like a serial killer in a movie, and I wonder whether he is acting. If so, my mother and I are superior at his profession; we perform the porousness of our forms on a daily basis. We can impersonate sidewalks, most pigeons, and elastic waistbands. My mother feeds me lines to regurgitate whole: If he asks whether you live alone, say no. If he asks for your name, make it up. If he asks you to touch it, say you have a transmissible skin disease that causes baldness, impotence, and loss of judgment. After the overture of his knocking, after he accepts that our doorbell is broken and that battering it with his thumb cannot revive its armored heart, he always whispers through the wood: I just want to talk, I just want to talk.

“Your father used to do the same thing,” my mother says, as if it’s possible for me to forget. “He stood in the doorway when I tried to leave and said, ‘I just want to talk.’ I told him to move out of the way. The week before, I’d packed all my clothes in a trash bag, because he never touched the trash, and because he’d hidden my suitcase from me. He thought a minor inconvenience would override my desire to stay alive. He was right. I was never rational. I could never leave behind my things, my life. They’re mine, and I deserve them. I deserve them. So I stayed, and you cried. You said all you needed was me. You said you didn’t care if we had to be homeless. But I was always searching for a way to stay behind and survive. You’re young, so you don’t know. You don’t understand what it means to be alone. You think I could have raised you, clothed you, fed you all by myself? Your life was made possible by the constant presence of death.”

Death was my father. Death put a roof over our heads. Death double-insulated the walls so that we would not be cold in the winter or hot in the summer. It was to death that I owed my life’s debt. My mother took care of my father until he died, and I avoided passing the open doorway of their bedroom, avoided looking into his eyes, ashamed that I could not hate him.

After all, in my mind, he had merely presented us with the choice that everyone is born with: Sacrifice your life one day at a time, or let the world take it from you all at once. We were lucky, my mother said, that our world was only one man.

My mother breaks the window embedded in the front door, bashing the glass with her flashlight and shattering the pane into a cascade of silver blades. She reaches into the jagged hole, shredding the soft skin of her forearm, twisting open the handle from the inside. The door swings open. I play lookout, but no one notices. My mother stands in the doorway, her face smeared in shadow, shining her flashlight into the liquid darkness of her stalker’s house. “Don’t touch the light switch,” my mother says. “We’ll leave fingerprints.” When I remind her that she’s already touched the doorknob, she laughs and says I’m her smart girl, her voice of reason, her miniature prophet. Leave this house. A better life awaits, I want to say. But what use is a prophet who doubts her own message?

I follow her across the threshold, glass salting the soles of our plastic slippers. My heart sways. Her flashlight rakes over a plastic-sheathed sofa, a countertop with tiles like gritted teeth, an unruffled beige carpet, a cardboard box. No sign of a dog. No human residue. There’s a collection of mugs on a newspaper-covered card table, their clean rims glowing like the rings of an unreachable planet. I am shocked by the simultaneous foreignness and familiarity of this landscape: His duplex unit is an exact copy of ours, but he has populated it differently, his presence like a layer of dust, whereas we live with the gluttony of ghosts, tearing off cabinet doors in brief surges of rage, staining the carpet with sloshes of broth, permanently clogging the landline with our international chatter. I can step into a room my mother has left and know exactly where she’s been standing; her absence is not so much an odor as a magnet, my charge seeking its opposite, my passivity nestled in her aggression.

When we reach his bedroom, my mother brushes aside the shadow that curtains his doorway and enters. She kicks off her slippers, bits of glass flickering in her path, like she’s wading out of a mirror. I imagine that’s how all of us are born: We enter the world through our own reflections, shattering our images to replace them with something smaller.

In the beam of her flashlight, I see a bed frame like a beached skeleton. The air is scraped clean of dust. The dark has lost its grip on the sky and slides down his window. His nightstand is a squat bookshelf filled with photos of us. All the photos are framed, which makes my mother laugh. “I’ve never framed a photo of myself, not once in my life,” she says. “Except my wedding photo. But I was barely in that. All you can see is the dress I rented. Too big for me and pinned up in the back. It was hard to walk in. But my veil was a lit-up trail, so easy to follow. Easier than living.” The wedding photo used to sit on the mantelpiece installed by my father, though we had no fireplace. I used to pretend he was the fire, and it reminded me to maintain a wide radius.

I tell my mother that the stalker has been inside our house. How else could he have gotten these photos? The rest are candid shots: Me and my brothers crouching over a rusted scooter we found in the empty lot that dead-ends our street. My brothers leaving home, all of them loaded into a truck, their heads jutting out the windows as my mother and I wave goodbye from the sidewalk. My mother bent over the last red camellia on our bush, her fingers plunged into its bloody bowl. Me walking home from school, my backpack slung over one shoulder, my hands wearing the iridescent gloves of Hot Cheetos bags, flipped inside out for the purpose of extracting the very last crumbs. It’s a trick my mother taught me, and I cannot bear this blatant display of my inherited habits, the littlest things that my mother has transmitted to me. My uneven gait, the way I laugh with my head thrown back. All of it has been touched by him, handled without any care, like he’s intercepted a missive between my mother and me, tearing it open without understanding a word of what we’ve written.

In every photo, our faces are blurry. Only memory has made them legible to me. We are cloud-cloaked, trapped in smoked mirrors. I almost laugh at his cleverness: He can claim these photos are not of us. What proof is there that he took our images if only we can recognize ourselves? My mother knocks the photos down, one by one, flicking the frames the same way she used to loosen my baby teeth when I complained of the pain. She would make me close my eyes while I opened my mouth. You’re braver than me, she would say. Braver to choose a brief, bright agony over a dull, elongated pain.

Her fingers hover over the pewter-framed wedding photo: she and my father at the altar, bodies angled toward each other, their faces turned to the camera. “Should I take it back?” she asks, and I shake my head. She sighs and steps away from the shelf, says it’s for the best. He’ll notice it’s missing, and we don’t want to get arrested. It’s probably too late for that, I tell her, and she smiles at me. Her silver fillings only show when she’s laughing, and I wish she would laugh. She tells me not to worry, that there’s no one in this world who can disappear the way we do. I’ve had a lifetime of practice, and she’s had the span of a marriage. She steps forward and rights the pictures, one by one, making sure that they’re evenly spaced on the glossy shelf. They form a shallow arc, a smile in the dark. Then we retrace our steps, harvesting seeds of glass from the ground, collecting the rest with the vacuum we find in his closet. “He must have been married at one time,” my mother says while detangling the cord. “This is the kind of vacuum only wives know to buy.” With the bleach under his sink, my mother scours a few spots of her blood from the carpet, streaking it with comets of white. “It looks like we jacked off in here,” she says.

In the hallway, she fumbles on her hands and knees for her slippers, and I see that the back of her shirt is sheer with sweat, the first sign of exertion. The front of her body is always a different reality: pristine, static, her face a sheathed blade. Because she stands in front of fear, stains only appear on the back of her. For a moment, I am afraid that her flesh will turn as transparent as her shirt. That she’ll puddle on the carpet, seeping into every fiber, and I’ll never get her to leave this house, never find a way to free her.

We leave the door unlocked. The window can’t be fixed. I crouch in the barren bushes in front of his house, flinching at the light of each passing car, praying that none is a dust-colored sedan. My mother stands in front of the serrated hole in his door, her hands on her hips like she’s proud of it. Her arm will scar. My eyes stitch it up. Looking through the broken window, my mother laughs at last. It’s the sound I share with her, the kind of laughter that demands to be duplicated, the trees ringing their leaves, the crows snapping open their beaks and beating their wings. It’s not the sound of triumph, a flood of joyous doves. It’s a blood-covered love.

My mother says we come from warriors. At the age of fourteen, our ancestral kin were sent into the forest one at a time to cut off the head of a rival warrior and bring it back to the village. If they did not succeed, a rival warrior was destined to sever one of their own heads and bring it back to the rival village. The practice was eventually banned by the government for its brutality, but my mother says that’s an irony. The government didn’t know the meaning of the word. Brutality is senselessness. Death without meaning, without dignity. They banned our forms of death, she says, precisely because they were honorable.

My mother says we come from weavers, who are far more important than warriors. They’re memory. They’re story. Warriors try to perfect death, while weavers lend themselves wholly to life, turning our terror and happiness into tapestry. The reason why we dream when we sleep is because weavers cannot bear the blankness of our minds at night. They thread every color that we weep. Weavers do not go to war, she says, because they find it too interesting to do nothing.

My mother is a triptych. She sutures the past to the present to the future. She loves aquariums because the ugliest creatures in the world live in the sea, lumpy and slimy and colorless. She is thrilled by the idea of people paying to look at such dim and hideous beings. Her longest relationship is with a trio of whales whose migration she follows online. She has been arrested three times, once before I was born and two times for attacking my father, first with the plastic handset of a landline telephone and second with a foldable ironing board. I mourn the short life of her rage. I wonder if I am alive to preserve it in my lesser form, if I can sustain myself solely with spite, if I am disastrously entranced with the idea of becoming her savior. I pretend that my silent anger is justice, that my refusal to forget every humiliation is a way of delivering delayed punishment. If only I can outlive him, I used to think. When he goes from this world, only my memory will remain, and I will finally win because he will no longer exist to defend himself. But I forgot that my father is death itself and will therefore never die. I tend to my anger like a god at the hearth of an eternal flame, a directionless heat, an invisible jurisdiction. I believe this makes me noble, that someone will see my devotion and reveal that I am the reason why the world is alive, why it is still possible to become kind.

My mother says everyone should laugh at least three times a day. Big laughter that breaks the belly like a vase, laughter that spills water. It is a necessity, like eating, and if I don’t laugh meatily, she will carve out a portion of her own and share it with me.

My mother says that everyone in this world is born out of love or spite, and you don’t get to choose which one. I tell her that spite is a kind of love. That I was born to be her witness or her vengeance. I still don’t know the difference. Sometimes I think my mother’s unwillingness to leave my father came from an immovable belief that she was weak, a belief that was planted and nourished by her mother and my father. Other times, it seemed to be a calculated strategy, a trade for false safety. The awful utility of survival. Both possibilities were a tragedy, so I ended my wondering. Impervious to wonder, my life could not change. I stay because someday I’ll break my leg, and how will I pay for the doctor then? I stay because I want to live within walls. I dream of being able to provide for her, of being a better man than my father. I dream we are trees, born with the right to sprawl toward the sky. If we can unfurl our roots beneath the earth and grow only along a vertical axis, if we can sleep standing up and absorb light as sustenance, if our limbs never loiter on anyone’s property, then maybe we will be allowed to stay. Maybe the earth will consider us immovable.

My mother unhooks birds from the sky as if they’re cheap earrings that will turn her earlobes green. She tosses them into the cavern of her mouth and makes her mind a sky.

My mother tells me not to think so much. That the moment I consider myself a failure, I take my foot off the neck of this rotten world.

Because I’ll never have to live without knowing her, my mother will never die. Some lives are so wide, they can hold the whole of your own inside.

The morning after we break into her stalker’s house, my mother and I discover a dead pig on our doorstep. She is the one who finds it: When she tries to open the front door, it ricochets off a rump. After crawling out our front window, we stare at its hulk: The pig’s throat is gashed open, the slit bobbing like a red boat. At first I think it must still be breathing, but then I see that the wind is just fluttering the mast of its skin. The pig glistens with a sour-smelling preservative that stings my nose. Its belly is torn open, the pearlescent rope of its guts circling its throat like a cold necklace. Its empty eye sockets are like the thumbprints a child leaves in wet concrete. At our feet is a rug of congealing blood.

“What a fucking waste,” my mother says. “That’s not how you slaughter a pig. You only slit the throat. You hang up the body and let the blood drain slowly. That’s how you make the meat tasty. Otherwise, it’s just one more dead thing in the world.”

The pig is the size of a child lying on their side. It reminds me of all the times my brothers and I pretended to run away from home, only to curl up on our bald doormat, too afraid to truly leave, too stubborn to come back inside. I feel a surge of sympathy for this pig at our threshold.

My mother sighs and says the meat can’t be salvaged, not when the slaughtering has been so ugly. It’s too bad, because a pig of this size could have been roasted and fed to the whole neighborhood. “My stalker is so selfish,” she says. Rolling up her sleeves and the cuffs of her jeans, my mother grabs its hind legs and tells me to help. I bend down and grasp its front legs, which are slimy and surprisingly tender, the flesh sloshing like water.

My mother insists on burying it in our front yard, since it won’t fit into our bins. In front of the camellia bush, she begins to dig. I stand vigil beside the corpse, which is beginning to stink in the heat. Morning light patterns its pale hide, its squashed snout, the torn tabs of its ears. Its intestines have unraveled, their iridescent trail winding all the way from our doorway to this hole in the dirt. My mother kneels and scoops out the soil with her bare hands, abandoning her trowel. “If I had known I’d be burying something of this size, I would have invested in a shovel,” she says, smiling at me. The curve of her lips reminds me of the slit in the pig’s throat. Dirt spatters her face like flecks of blood. When was the last time I looked at my mother and didn’t imagine her death?

After the first time my father threatened to kill her and then himself, I learned to zip her into death as if it were a fitted dress. Every time I crossed the threshold, I paused before my eyes adjusted to the dimness, before I heard her in the kitchen and prepared to see the worst. I shut my eyes and arranged her on the sofa, sprawled her out on the floor. It was deeply comforting to imagine her dead, beaten, or strangled, because I believed nothing could be worse than what I conjured up in my mind. No reality could rival my monstrosity.

My mother stands at last and peers into the hole. It’s too shallow and wide, more of a crater than a proper grave. I imagine a future meteor meeting our front yard, the crater manufactured before impact. The consequence before the action. Patting the dirt off her hands, my mother sighs and says it’s good enough. The pig deserves to rest. I ask her if she thinks the corpse is a threat. Perhaps her stalker wants to gut us too. But my mother shakes her head. She says the crows told her that the man is nothing but a lonely widower, a retired real estate agent who plays poker in the park, no more dangerous and no less irritating than a dog turd. “That’s why his home is so empty,” she says. “I bet he is too. There’s not even a bowel movement left in him. I bet his dog is the only thing that cares he’s still alive. I should have checked his fridge when we went in. He’ll probably die from his own neglect.”

My mother bends over the pig and grips its front hooves, hauling it toward the hole. I hear the pop of its leg dislocating from the socket, an echo of my dry swallow. Its skin ripples as if some other creature is wearing it, desperate to shed this death. I wedge my foot under its buttocks, nudging it farther along. At last, the pig reaches its rest. Kneeling, I pour handfuls of soil onto its side as my mother reels in its intestines with her hands. Because the hole is so shallow, we have to build a mound over its body, a hill with a heaving soul. My mother pelts its face with fistfuls of dirt and whispers, “Die, fucker. Shiteater. Kill yourself.”

When we are done, I stand and brush off my knees, rising to rinse my palms under the spout in front of the house. My father installed that water. I stand with my back to the mound, but I can see its reflection in the window. My mother stands on top of it, jumping up and down like a child on a trampoline. I imagine the carcass oozing, its belly smacked open, its intestines spraying out. My mother climbs down from the mound and joins me by the spigot. I still can’t turn around; I can feel the mound breathing, the pig inside alive, dirt packed into its nostrils, broken leg twisting like a key in the wrong door, searching for a way out.

We’ve buried it alive, I want to say, but my mother breathes hard beside me, not listening. As the water threads between my fingers, she says we have nothing to worry about anymore. It’s all over. Studies show that the quality of women’s lives improves when their husbands die, while the opposite is true for men whose wives die. They lose their labor force: Their laundry doesn’t get done, their meals don’t get cooked, their misplaced glasses don’t get found, their medication doesn’t get taken, their stains don’t get out, their guilt doesn’t get absolved, their friendships don’t get renewed, their complaints don’t get absorbed and instantly digested into fixes. But widows find their time restored, like corpses surfacing to slurp up the sun. They get hobbies and friends and good sleep. Their feet burrow into dirt and become roots, and they find that in solitude, eternity is finally possible. Time has no measure when you’re alone. Death is a season to pass through, and on the other side is more life, the nameless kind.

“Statistically, our lives have improved,” my mother says to our reflection. My face is drained of human heat, my skin like pocked concrete. Then my mother squints through our window and curses, scolding me for leaving the light on in the kitchen. She says that I bleed her dry every time I leave the lights on. Money doesn’t regenerate in our marrow. Shutting off the spigot, she hurries toward the house. Before she reaches the door, my mother turns to face me. She points at the ground, telling me to hose off the bloodstain before I come back inside. Turn around, I think, turn around. Show me your back so I might know at last what you truly believe.

When she enters the house, I stare at the back of her floral blouse. Sweat stains are hardly discernible when she wears a pattern like that, but I try to detect the colors shuddering, the petals darkening. She may smile when she speaks to me about studies and statistics and the birth of our happiness, but her face is bone-lit from within, framed by an unwavering brightness, and she’s the one who taught me that light always costs something.

My mother was silent for the first fourteen years of her life. Inside the apartment she shared with her mother and older sister, she did not emit a single word. She didn’t even fart. To release the air in her belly soundlessly, she disemboweled herself daily. Stitching herself up by moonlight, she became an extremely competent seamstress, a skill she later transferred to her work at garment factories. The only form of speech my mother permitted herself was bleeding, since blood is inaudible as it exits the body. Her silence was so total that when she was horizontal, she could hear her own heart’s machinery as if it were one of the jets passing over the apartment building, flying away with the sound of her name. She could hear the resonance of her bladder like a bronze bell, and to make it sing, she battered her abdomen. She could hear a swallow building its nest in her throat, laying empty eggs. “I was silent,” my mother says, “because my mother yelled, and I thought that the world would run out of sound if we used the same amount. I thought sound was like everything else we owned, toilet paper and food and soap, I thought I had to conserve. Because I did not speak, my mother could spend all the sound she wanted, and I would someday get to claim whatever was left over. In the shelf of my mouth, I kept a row of unused sound that I could bring with me when I left. If I ever opened my lips and accidentally revealed it, she would take it from me. So I kept my mouth shut.”

My mother maintained this silence with her sister, whom she neither spoke to nor mentioned until I was fourteen. She says that her sister always fought back: “She doubled the size of every scream she received. If I was silence, she was an echo. She sprayed her voice all over the pyre of sound that was our house, and she didn’t care if I was incinerated along with it. I wanted to tell her to be silent, to be like me. I resented her constant need to resist. Why couldn’t she just accept her death?” It surprises me, this story of my mother’s former passivity. In my mind, even her silence is productive, like a tree converting water into time.

My mother fertilizes silence with three phrases: 是你的就是你的, 不是你的就是你的. What is yours is yours, what is not yours is not yours. 人為財死鳥為食亡. Two things are forever true: People die in pursuit of money, and birds die in pursuit of food. 你有的就是最好的. The best things are whatever are yours.

My mother says she was impregnated by an earthquake. Mud was jolted free from a mountain, and because she was in the habit of sleeping with her legs wide open, it followed gravity and filled her every cavity. The landslide dredged up layers of earth that had not been touched for centuries, so the dirt inside her was history, teeming with fossils. When she looks at the shaken landscape of my face, she says, “Maybe it’s best that I was impregnated with an unknown head. It means no one can know you. It means you have a choice in what to become.”

Someday, my mother will confess that she starts a fight with me every time I leave the house so that it’s easier for her to say goodbye.

The night we bury the pig, my mother goes to bed early. Since I refuse to share the room she once shared with my father, I sleep on the floor of the living room. I leave the blinds open so that I can stare at the grave in our front yard, thinking of how the mound began to sink bit by bit every hour this afternoon, the ground flatlining like a heartbeat, the flies wreathing a fading warmth. Maybe the pig has dissolved already, the same soundless way we disappeared from the stalker’s house, the same way we deserted our own lives. Maybe the grave will go concave, the absence of the body so much bigger than the body. Though the flies have long since flitted toward a more recent corpse, I hear their buzzing in my head, their wings scraping away at my bone’s ceiling. I was once a skull in the mountain of my mother. A fossil loosened by a landslide, a daughter of apocalypse. Myth is inescapable. There was never any chance we would get out of that mud. My comforter is suddenly heavy, sweat sliding like silt down my belly. My pillow disintegrates into dirt, filling my ears with dense silence. I jerk out of half sleep, tossing aside my blanket. I refuse to be buried. In the darkness, I rise and go toward the door. I turn the knob, swing it open. My way is free of barricades.

Nothing dead or living waits on the stoop. I step onto the glowing sidewalk, the moon reflected in its mirror. I count seven houses as I walk, trying not to look back at where my mother sleeps. Where the mound in our front yard trembles like laughter. If I had fallen asleep tonight, would that mud have slunk toward me, filling my cavities? Is this the closest I have ever come to leaving? Have I left her behind to live or to die?

I stand in front of his house. The window in his door is still broken. The jagged pieces of glass have been pawed out of the frame, and the hole is square and clean as the character for “mouth.” The way my mother writes it, with four clean strokes in perfect order. When I was little, it amazed me that she could write our names without looking at the page, while I had to witness every movement of my hand, not trusting it to obey.

I walk up to the door and reach into the mouth, killing its cleanness. I fumble for the teeth of its lock. The door opens. There is nothing left to imagine. The darkness is complete as a screen, the silence as immersive as stepping into the sea. I wonder if my mother is right — if her stalker is empty, lodged in a dreamless and boneless sleep, no more than his skin.

My eyes bob. The night thickens into another dimension. A forested future. Busy as bone marrow, the darkness teems without sound. I take a step. Another. I wait for the bark of a dog. But there is only the deadly silence of my father when he was calm. My hands trace a wall, form around a corner. A coffee table greets my knees, licking off the dirt of this morning. I bump into the jutting lip of a sofa cushion, and when I sit down on it, I feel the warmth of someone beside me.

The front door shuts on its own, severing the only current of cold air. No moon in this room. I sit still, holding my breath, waiting for the warmth beside me to waft away. But it remains. It is almost radiant. I turn my head, and beside me is a woman.

She is not alive. I know this because she glows. It is not the glow of blood or heat or teeth. It is the uncanny light of something that has eaten its own eyes. The cold light of a knuckle split to the bone. I want it inside my mouth. I want it to drown.

The woman is older than me by a few decades. I can tell not from her face, featureless as a flashlight beam — no eyes, no mouth, no nose — but from the way she touches me, extending one hand to my shoulder, a touch so gentle it makes me shudder. Is this what it feels like to be given wonder? She touches me again, this time with the desperation of someone who has eaten death and can no longer strain her skin to contain it. Because she has no mouth, she cannot regurgitate. Her throat bobs up and down in a steady beat, as if a heart is the only sound she can still make. I lean into her touch, her cold hand cupping the bone of my shoulder. She twists to face me, and I fall forward to meet her body, the two of us sinking into the sofa, the cushions slick with anticipation. Silky as mud. I stroke her blank face, and the sound of her hum surrounds us, encasing us in a solid column. The sound she makes is stone. She wears a black skirt down to her calves, a black blouse that is forgiving to blood. Her death is incandescent, filling the house with a flock of white light, bleaching the landscape we lie on. I know she is the stalker’s wife, her death introducing itself to me, her absence tethered to his presence. Her need is my gravity. Grasping the hem of her skirt, she lifts it to her chest and pins the seam to her ribs. With one hand, she pushes my head down. Her hair is coarse like the fibers of night, like my life’s dissolving weave. Like everything that grows of its own unbeatable will. Her clit tastes of the moon’s broken rib. It is so good I gag. I want to work for her pleasure, to be plowed down by the force of it. Acid swarms up my throat and scours me clean, my ribs uncaging rain. I will always live with this inarticulate rage. She bucks her hips, grinding herself against me. Her belly quakes, and I imagine it backsliding into my mouth. I widen my jaw into an entrance for the dead. Parting from her for a moment, I slide two fingers inside her, and she pushes my head back down, thrusting into my mouth. I tease her with my tongue, using the tip to circle her swollen clit, feeling its shaft turn plum with blood. It hums. I cinch my lips around it, sucking gently, then return her to the saddle of my tongue, let her ride me to the rhythm of her bobbing throat, her hand guiding my hand to her breast, frantic for the friction of my thumb. When she comes, the sound rises from beneath us, from the mud, and I realize that it has always been her mouth. A planet too wide to describe. An edgeless light. A warm liquid rakes the insides of my thighs, and I know I’ve wet myself. I think of the dog that pissed in our yard, the violent pattern of its splatter. The dirt moistened into a mouth. Like a dog, I can’t say my own name. The stain will soon set. The woman wraps her legs around my waist, locking me in place. She reaches up and presses her thumbs to my eyelids, scrolling them shut, slipping darkness over my head.

I have always wanted to leave this house, her silence says to me: Let’s leave together now that I’m dead. Her heels drum my back, doubling my heartbeat. But there is no future she can follow me into. There is nothing I can guarantee, neither happiness nor safety. I want to tell her this, but her death has a laughter, and it tells me that doesn’t matter.

Outside my house, the body of the pig turns phosphorescent, its death becoming as radiant as hers. When it rises and shakes the earth off its back, the mud will be spurned into motion at last. It will slide toward life, devastating and catastrophic. I will stand in its path and laugh.