“Glowing wallpaper,” I say, with a hint of deflation. “I still can’t seem to control myiridescence.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “You’d be surprised what that woman will accept if you say it with enough confidence.”
She opens the door. Morning light cuts across the kitchen floor in a sharp diagonal, and I pull back from it instinctively.
“Noon,” she says again, and closes the door behind her.
I move to the window above the sink.
I keep my form pressed thin against the cabinet below the sill and extend just enough of myself upward to see through the glass.
Her truck sits in the driveway, the red one with the oxidized patch on the tailgate that looks like a cloud. She walks to it with her thermos and her keys, opens the door, tosses her bag across to the passenger seat.
The engine turns over on the second try. The brake lights flare red, then release, and the truck rolls down the driveway and swings onto Coyote Springs Road heading east.
I watch until the dust plumefades.
The house settles around me.
The refrigerator hums its low A-flat.
The clock sweeps.
A soap timer on the studio counter blinks 00:00, waiting to be reset.
Through the walls, I feel the curing racks full of rosemary-oat bars slowly releasing moisture into the dry air, each one contracting by fractions as it hardens.
On every surface, traces of her.
The thermal signature of her palm on the countertop, already cooling.
The compression pattern her boots left in the kitchen mat.
A single strand of reddish-brown hair caught in the screen door’s hinge.
All the places she pressed against the house this morning, fading by degrees.
I settle onto the kitchen floor and spread thin, pressing myself against the cool linoleum.
I wait.
I wait for twenty minutes before the restlessness starts.
Restlessness is a human word, and maybe the wrong one.
My substance has a resting state, a kind of equilibrium I can hold indefinitely when there’s nothing to process. In the cave, I held it for weeks at a time. In the storage unit, months.
But Maisie’s house is so full of stimuli that equilibrium feels like trying to hold still in a river.
I move down the hallway.
The house is small enough that I can feel its whole footprint from any room, but proximity reveals detail.
The hallway floor creaks in two places, and I learn to flow over them.
Three framed photographs hang on the wall.
The first shows a younger Maisie with a woman who shares her jaw and the set of her shoulders: Gram.
