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In the middle of the afternoon of the third week your ex-roommate watches cable on the small TV. You finger hieroglyphics in the houseplant dust. They shiver with your Morse code. Listen, you say, I don’t have the money for rent or food or anything. You wait. No response. Your ex-roommate turns up the volume and says, This is the one where the bad guy jumps. Too fucking funny. You sit at his feet, then work yourself around until your hand is on his fly and you’re imagining the flaccid snail of his penis. No, he says, hands you your hairbrush, and continues, Your mother called. She wants you to come back home.

You dial your mother’s number, but you do not go back home. After one ring, you hang up. You brush your hair. You click around online, but none of your Internet friends have written you and you’re already written them many notes, looked at their new photos, and played at stalker. You call your mother and hang up. You do this every time you get up to pee. You know she has caller ID on her phone and you don’t care. If you could do worse to her, you would, but if she does remember, she says it never happened. In her emails she writes, You’re crazy. So what it was my gun. Don’t you know your lies hurt me? You want them to hurt her. You do. Only, they’re not lies and you know it.

When your flatmate comes home with six free pizzas from his delivery job, you share slices. You top yours with the inner juices of peperoncinis and the hard seeds of red peppers. He tops his with marinara and garlic butter. The meal is almost good. The wind flutters the receipts on the undelivered boxes, but not his hair in its stand up, every which way fashion. Can I touch it? you say. Can you what? he asks, tucking the flaps of cardboard into their slots. Can I brush it? you repeat and reach for your blue brush inside your bathrobe pocket. He doesn’t answer, but takes the boxes and stacks them in the fridge. He returns with two cans of cola. The tongue-like straws inside their metal mouths push out, high with carbonation. He lays his head in your lap and says, I found an aloe plant smashed outside our building. You don’t reply and press your fingers into his hair.

Your ex-roommate has taken to writing your portion of the bills on a wipe board. You practice the handwriting and change the figures. You write a check for the new amount. When no one is home but you, you stand in the doorway of their bedrooms and look. You want to go in, but don’t. Instead you have fantasies of inserting cheese curls into the crevices of their belongings—inside the unworn winter boots, the screw hole where a dresser knob once was, the USB drive. The fantasies become more elaborate with time as cheese curls occupy all the holes, the cracks of the windows, the underside of African violet leaves, and the flaps of pillowcases. Cheese curls topple to the floor, spill from closet shelves, and become a crunchy powder affixed to their clothes when they leave for work. When they come home you give them secret smiles. They never ask what’s so funny. Mostly, when they look at you, they stare at the scars you thought no one could see, cough, and then leave the room. 

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