I instantly felt sorry, and then my hand started bleeding. She had kind of a shocked look on her face that managed to retain the rage from the now unknowable time before I put my clenched fist through the window pane between us. Seriously it felt like that glass breaking marked two different eras of history. My hand bled more.

Now that I could hear her clearly, she didn’t have anything to say. Neither did I. We just looked at each other, and I finally felt relief that I hated her. I pictured an ambulance ride with a police officer next to me, a long weekend standing on concrete floors and smoking cigarettes, dirty cots and stuff. I was going to miss two shifts at work. 

Shelly came downstairs, and I could see her down the hall, her little face just kind of a blank. She had a painting in her hand for the fridge and she stopped to watch us. God, I wanted to see that painting up close. Her mother saw me looking over her shoulder and turned around. All of this happened soundless, or maybe the sound would come rushing up in a few seconds and all go at once, glass breaking and her breath catching in her throat and clomping on the stairs and birds and the mailman’s truck and the freeway hum all one noise together, harmonics of an ending.

I sat down where I was and waited for the sound to find me.