Since she wouldn’t talk to him, the doctor had her draw a picture of a cat. She took a while to agree to it.

She included what she often saw around objects: molecular structure breaking down around the edges. The thing became the background and the background the thing. Although she can locate a cat in the shimmer in real life, even when it is something other than a cat, the drawing that day is less persuasive.

After this, the new drug they’d discussed is deemed suitable. 

So—she gives herself a shot in alternating butt checks every week, Sunday evenings, on the bed, angled toward the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, head cocked, eyes watering, feeling for places that have not yet hardened under the skin.

The new doctor, like all the previous ones, asked about voices, looked disappointed when she shook her head. There are the Long Friends, of course, and of course he would have wanted to hear about them, but they are mute witnesses, a silent gathering, dependable defenders of the periphery. They are confidants, secrets-holders, and in their quietude? Outside the parameters of his question.

But since this new drug, they have not made an appearance.

They had been all shimmer, and the shimmer is gone.

She really is alone now.

She watches what goes on outside a lot, although there’s not much to see. Cars passing, people walking dogs. She used to avoid looking at things. Now she watches the leaves individually twist and float down off the trees, no longer in rippling bands of muddy light. The yard is carpeted in crinkly browns. It’s the first year her husband won’t be there to do the duty—one more thing he doesn’t have to do any more.

In the living room, she looks out the front window. The neighbor across the street is raking, heaping leaves in a blue tarp and dragging them over the stone wall on his property to dump into the woods. She watches him take a break, lean on his rake, look up into the trees, maybe to see what’s in his future. He gathers the next load and drags the tarp down the driveway, around past the garage side of his house, and disappears.

The phone rings, the still-active landline that was her husband’s business line. She never answers the phone when it rings; not this one or her cell. The landline she doesn’t care about and wishes he would cancel finally. She keeps the voicemail full on the cell to block new ones. She rarely looks at a stored number to see who called.

Looking out the window, in the dining room now, she doesn’t see the man in his yard.

As she opens the front door, a plane passing over is throwing down a funnel of sound. The neighbor is standing on her front walk, just below the porch steps.

  The air is acrid with the smoke from someone’s fireplace, and she puts her hand over her face. After he sees her cover her nose and mouth, he pulls up the white cloth mask from under his chin.

“Sorry! Saw all the deliveries piling up! Wanted to check! Thought nobody was home! Crazy times!”

She looks at the half-dozen or so stacked brown boxes of different sizes. Maybe the last driver arranged them, after adding his contribution.

The neighbor’s wife died, not very long ago but before the virus. They never spoke to the woman in the six years they’d lived across the street, not even the time just after they moved in, when she had brought over a container of soup filled with suspicious and probably dangerous ingredients, left it on the front porch where all the boxes are now, while they were busy somewhere unpacking.

Out on the street, a car is coming. Another behind that. Up the hill, from the other direction, someone without a mask is walking a dog wearing a red coat. From inside the house, the phone rings again.

She wants to ask the man if he wouldn’t mind raking her leaves, or if not him, maybe someone else he could recommend. She wants to tell him she wants something else to eat besides cereal, nuts, pasta, and soup. She wants to get back inside and leans away.

“Okay! Just checking! Sorry to bother you! Enjoy the day! Crazy times!”

Under her hand, her lips move a little, uttering ghost words that haunt the things she might say, if there were anyone to listen, if she had someone close enough to hear.

*