It all begins with your hand aloft, strangling a coupe, raising a toast. Bubbles roll out of your mouth, a burgeoning cyclone, your throat the waterfall. No, it was never a coupe. A glass?

No, a plastic cup. And it was never champagne, only water from the last bottle. You have washed ashore on a mattress, an island in a lake of barren marble. The house is empty;

this is your last night in it. But every minute elapsed brings reparation: the dining table, once disassembled, is now whole again. Cardboard boxes send books scrambling for their cases.

Curtains unfold at once, dark sheets of hair slipping out of an untied ribbon. Painting and photographs lurch up the walls. The clothes you grabbed on the day you left float before the

shelves until they have rejoined their place. Next, your father is returned: he errs into the kitchen, where the last chords of the song can be heard. You return. Suitcase abandoned in

the hallway, hands shaking, you return. You run backwards up seven stories in the dark until you reach home. Here, everything carries the faded smell of a familiar ache, a comforting

loss like the ache for the scent of your infant brother’s hair. Your father, the curator, has kept your room untouched for a year. Twelve months have gone by; he has reigned alone over a

kingdom of slowly decaying groceries. Ants have made the fridge their dominion. Desert dust hovers above the valley that splits the mountain ranges open like rotten fruit. In your

father’s mind, plans to get you out of the country begin to unravel. The electricity clicks back on, the walls of the power plant summoned back together by a magnetic hand. A.

reappears on the threshold. She kisses you, takes back all of her goodbyes. Tears crawl up her cheeks and shrink into her caruncles; in three years, she will sit next to you on the first

day of school and tell you her name. At night, bombs bolt from fractured buildings into the entrails of invisible planes. Pilots recoil to their homeland down south, climb into the beds

where their wives lay sleeping. With them, the sound of explosions recedes; bursts of blinding light coax us back to sleep. One by one, the words on the CNN ticker dissipate,

block letters losing ground to the lull of summer. The landline stops ringing. Your parents run to the restaurant they left precipitously, settle once more before their plates for their last

dinner. In an hour, your father will be thirty-nine once again. At home, where you remain, alone, the final girl almost falls prey to the monster. One by one, her friends resuscitate.

Outside, the night has thrown a thousand darts of light onto the sprawling hills. From the cloudless air, a silent breath is returned to your throat.