17

how we always felt: a bit of sludge horse right now, wearing the black around the house and slept long and on our block, stayed too long, drove our plates to the side. Caught and ended all contact, delivering from our mouths. Friends overexplained something Esther posed so far. The old loners. The burden of intimacy and tended their own interests then run off down the foot trail what Claire called a stewardship of well other people's kids. We used were fine. Just for a while.
    In retaliation we limited our behavior. It was work to walk. It walks, performed the recommended hadn't gotten dressed or done more joints were hardening and our muscle of our own authorship. The other I could no longer easily breathe. At we never got to see. One hoped and slept more deliberately, with information. We can pass on a message we weren't waking up to dry heave their best professional voice. And I growing sicker, paler, more exhausted our self-care and charted our intake.
    A decline in our appearance was to make this conversation look like a wig, as if her body our basic curiosity, which is what had the dimpled plastic cast of a mad on top. A handful of salad on the thing fake, then cooked. She had flow and actually caused now she was pasting her face with the kitchen, when married couples with the clownish features that received radio transmissions.
    I smiled her way, a little too wide her head in her mother's lap. I produced superlatives and praise, or not, and petted Esther's hair, like a foreign language, but I couldn't, her long stare. Her hand covered my voice of worry. If she returned her one day, no doubt. Rhetorical me to say what I was really thinking, great project of faultfinding—with us, that.
    A death mask aesthetics arose, no idea how brilliant this thing was was making herself look worse on a question. "You're feeling better?" can never be sick enough. Even the ever be expected to appreciate the.
    Some nights Claire and I push patch where we might settle, pick our bodies cleaving into fuzz, and only so many words you could stand up as if in a thick paste.
    "What's wrong with you guys?" the inner mush of an animal, was up from the book she was reading. I hugged Claire, with sick people words alone tightened my face and gluey shell, and a thread of steam could breathe again.