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focused on something over Chase’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “isn’t this Felicia’s house?”
    They looked into the yard. There were the three avocado trees standing watch over the small pool. There was the diving board that Felicia liked to lie on, reading a book that was held between her and the sun. A memory flapped up. A scorching summer day when they had ridden her scooter from the ice cream shop. He held a cone in each hand as she drove, stirring up a hot wind that attacked the vulnerable scoops. Twin trails of colorful splatter followed them as they raced for home, where their towels were spread by the pool. She accused him of eating them down to the cone during the short ride. It was just like
The Old Man and the Sea
, he explained. How the sharks got most of the big catch. She pushed him in the pool and he emerged with the mushy cones, which they molded to their noses and pecked at each other’s mouths like angry toucans. Her brother, sitting in the shade with
The Wall Street Journal
, told them to get a room.
    Get a room. Reliving the suggestion now pained him. He wanted to rewind and get back inside that assumption—that they would be doing what young couples do—before things got too tangled in his head and his body refused to follow. And it’s not like nothing ever happened. After all, he had been her first, as she had been his. But it had taken a lot of trying, and it soon became clear that it wasn’t just some kind of performance anxiety that he would get past after their bodies became more familiar with each other. Later, when she gently pressed him for an explanation, he could only say that he loved her too much. That her tenderness made him feel brotherly toward her. Yet he knew he possessed desire for her. It was there in his dreams. That’swhere they had explored each other, where he could answer her shape with his.
    One time, she had been waiting at the edge of sleep, when he dreamed they were entangled in the kind of embrace his waking mind wouldn’t allow. She felt it animating him behind her, and she tried to cross into his dream by gently taking him inside her. His hands, heavy with sleep, came up to her waist and held her tightly as he rocked against her, pushing deeply into her so that she had to muffle her gasps by biting her arm. But as he surfaced from sleep and his mind began to reorganize his world, she felt him receding. Still half asleep, he fought against it, but his determination quickly took on a tone of anger, of violence. She tried to pull away but he rolled on top of her, pinning her. She fought him off, kicking at him. His head hit the wall. He backed away, then quickly gathered up his clothes and left. That was the last time they shared a bed. A few weeks later, after they had exhausted all possibility of talking their way through it, she pushed him out into the world, telling him to get help—a directive his shame prevented him from pursuing.
    All this swam through his mind as he stood looking down at her parents’ house, but it was displaced with the sudden, sobering observation that Felicia’s dad was sitting on the porch. He could clearly see the man’s dark form, backlit by interior light passing through the sliding glass door. Was he talking to someone? His mouth was moving, head bobbing slightly. Maybe he was on the phone? Strange, but nothing Chase wanted to explore at the moment. The thought of being spotted standing at the backyard fence of Felicia’s house at two in the morning sent him running.

LILA FERRELL KNEW FROM THE INTERNET that it was happening.
    Insomnia was a trending topic online. It had crept into everyone’s status updates. People were posting videos of attacks on sleepers.
    So she knew what was going on when she emerged from her room one summer morning to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table, positioned exactly as they had been when she had said her goodnight. They looked ancient in the golden light from the desert pouring in