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Your mother begins sending you emails daily even though you’re over thirty. Though there once were three children, she still has two without holes. So why she needs you, you’ll never know. She writes in all caps, WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? I’VE JUST ABOUT GIVEN UP ON YOU!!! You press print and then delete. Every few days your sister, or the person who says she’s your sister, writes too, Mom’s dying. The doctors don’t know what—Lyme disease, cancer, an immune disease. The letter concludes, You should forgive her. I have. Print. Delete. Though you think the print button is dumb, it’s only a picture of a printer after all, you are besotted by the delete button. One large black X that makes anything go away. From the printer you remove the emails and fold the messages into paper airplanes. When you have a dozen or so, you launch them from your window, each chaperoned by a cheese curl passenger. You don’t watch where they land as you’re busy listening to the cardinal that has taken residence somewhere nearby. You also note that the ivy is dead from your particular style of nurturance. You throw it from the window. Shortly after doing so, you hear a scream and then nothing but the chink chink of the American flag chain whipping against the pole. You return to your inbox and open the new emails. One is from your mother, another is from the person pretending to be your dead sister, and the final is from your sister, the sister with a hole too big for her. You wonder how it’s possible she got on the Internet.

After a couple of dozen pizza slices over several weeks and after as many rounds of hair grooming, the flatmate parts the flaps of your robe and hooks a thumb into the tighty whities you wear. Why these? he asks. You look to his thumb and are startled to see orange powder in smudges along the otherwise bleached surface of the cotton underwear. You bleach the underwear weekly in the bathroom sink and dry them in your room behind the lace curtain. You answer, but at that moment a street sweeper passes by with its jets, wetness, and brushes scouring the pavement for reasons you’ve never understood. It’s the outdoors. It shouldn’t need cleaning. The roommate pulls the band of your briefs down a little lower, revealing the flare of your hipbone. I wish mine did that, he says, his hand now gripping one side of your pelvis. Okay, you say. Then you both hear footsteps and your ex-roommate’s keys jingle in the door. When the door opens, all is as it should be. The cable program flashes, your hairbrush plays the role of rabbit ears, and the flatmate tucks cardboard box edges into slots.

Perhaps then you’re a little surprised when it is your ex-roommate who unlocks your door with a key you didn’t know he had and offers you a bag of cheese curls. You pat the mattress you sit on, a bodice ripper in your hand and your hair brush standing guard at the window hole. The ex-roommate takes off his shoes, sits, and stretches back. His eyelashes reflect gold in the afternoon light. I know about the dry erase board, he says. I also found cheese curls inside my travel toothbrush case and a bottle of shampoo. That was you too, I suppose. Since he is on your bed, you do what you expect he wants. You put your hand on his fly and pull out the slug of his penis. It sits there for a moment between you, soft and not twitching. No, he says, You know what I want.

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