Take a deep breath and start from the beginning. We all get a little mixed up sometimes, and it's okay to not remember. Forgetting can be good. But you have to realize at some point that this task has always been about you, and could never be anything but. You have to approach mirrors again. You have to be able to look at your hands and smell the blood without getting sick. Come on, now. The sea never forgets what it's washed away. So let's start again. Begin with the first thing you can remember...


It's nearly the end of September when she wakes up on the floor of the bungalow living room. The pillows beneath her head have gone flat in her monolithic absence, and there is the distinct heaviness inside her skull of leftover alcoholic content. The new sedative they've been experimenting with has proved a cruel mistress. A soft shake of her head from side to side should ease the tension in her shoulders, but something beneath bone continues to ache regardless. Her entire backside remains numb as she scans the shadows on the wall, checking the time. How long has it been: two months? Three? The clock says five pm.

Her mouth feels cemented shut. Her husband is squinting at her, eyes still half-lidded from the deep sleep, but she can barely bring herself to look at him, even in the periphery. She can still see the violent red pop of his skull beneath a speeding bullet train registered to the Union Pacific, before her eyes flew open like a photo lens, dust floating innocuously through the late sunlight. If she could've eaten anything before this, she'd be vomiting.

"Are you okay?" he says hoarsely, barely lifting himself from the floor. They haven't used their real vocal cords in decades. She feels like every mote of dust in the living room came from her lungs, propelled there from cold train tracks, the rumble in her palms. Her fingers are frigid, filled with the irritating tingle of a fresh battery zing to the tongue, a childish test to see if it works. She twists each of them slowly.

"Let's not use that mixture again," she responds quietly, heart thrumming in a way she doesn't remember it ever doing before. What was before? The silver of her husband's band flashes in her mind's eye, the brine of a beach of brown sugar colored sand, and suddenly the room is so blurry. Her head is pounding. Where's a glass of water when you need one?

Dom caresses her shoulders, kisses her neck, contrite; a thoroughly practiced apology since university. He wants to go in again, and he wants her to come with him. She clenches her jaw and turns away, tears streaming down her cheeks. She hasn't even blinked yet. The carpet feels strange.

A car pulls into the driveway, gravel crunching under the weight of her mother's Fiat. Philippa gleefully slams the passenger door, a big girl, old enough to unbuckle herself now. James must come in tow; grandma's arms are his favorite.

With surgical silence, she deftly pulls the cannula from her purple-spotted injection sight. Dom is somehow still lousy with needles.

He grips her ankle once she stands. She knows he's waiting to be absolved, can't meet his anxious eyes.

"Mal, honey," he whispers, trying to read her, see if he truly fucked up this time. She closes her eyes. His thumb presses her bones, the blood rushing back to her feet screams like television static in her veins.

"The children need me," she says pointedly, a brow arching as their little footsteps grow closer, swiping her pale cheeks clean of sticky tear trails. She fakes a tiny smile, and disappears herself quickly into the long hallway, the shuddering in her belly unquited.

They don't speak again for rest of the night.