Prologue
or, Hospice

Before diving into this, I think some background would be useful. When she was younger, she had nightmares. She had scissor-pain and phantom limbs, and things that kept her nervous through that twelve-year interim. When she fell crossing that street (south of Houston, old Manhattan-land), those nightmares fell from building tops and took her by the hand.

She was brought into those rooms with sliding curtains and shining children’s heads. One of them, that boy, was not as lucky as she then. (Years later, he would return to her at night, just when she thought she might have fallen asleep. As she would later describe to me, his face would be up against hers, and she’d be too terrified to speak.)

Now, I won’t pretend I understand, because I can’t, and know I never will. But something makes her sting, and something makes her want to kill. It made her crawl under that house, and stick her head under the stove… well, my point in all of this is that it’s all connected in [bad word] nightmares that we wove.