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about her, maybe. They felt sorry for her and were protective of her.
    Her shoulder-length silvery hair, her soft-spoken manner. The expensive house, like something in a glossy magazine. That she was Kelsey’s actual aunt, and a widow .
    The acquisition of a “controlled substance”—other than prescription drugs—was a mystery to Agnes, though she understood that countless individuals, of all ages but primarily young, acquired these substances easily: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, OxyContin, Vicodin, even heroin and “meth.” Self-medicating had become nearly as common as aspirin. Recreational drugs began in middle school.
    She was a university professor. She understood, if not in precise detail, the undergraduate culture of alcohol, drugs.
    These were not university students, however. Though her niece Kelsey was enrolled in a community college.
    Like this, Aunt Agnes.
    It was sweet, they called her Aunt Agnes, following Kelsey’s lead.
    She liked being an aunt . She had not been a mother.
    They passed the joint to her. With shaky fingers she held the stubby cigarette to her lips—drew the acrid smoke into her lungs—held her breath for as long as she could before coughing.
    She’d never smoked tobacco. She’d been careful of her health. Her husband, too, had been careful of his health: he’d exercised, ate moderately, drank infrequently. He’d smoked, long ago—not for thirty years. But then, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer and rapidly the cancer had metastasized and within a few months he was gone.
    Gone was Agnes’s way of explanation. Dead she could not force herself to think, let alone speak.
    Kelsey was a good girl, Agnes was thinking. She’d had some trouble in high school but essentially, she was a good girl. After rehab she’d begun to take courses at the community college—computer science, communication skills. Agnes’s sister had said that Kelsey was the smartest of her children, and yet—Silver piercings in her face glittered like mica. Her mouth was dark purple like mashed grapes. It was distracting to Agnes, how her niece’s young breasts hung loose in a low-slung soft-jersey top thin as a camisole.
    She brought the joint to her lips, that felt dry. Her mouth filled with smoke—her lungs.
    He’d died of lung cancer. So unfair, he had not smoked in more than thirty years.
    Yet, individuals who’d never smoked could get lung cancer, and could die of lung cancer. In this matter of life-and-death, the notion of fair, unfair was futile.
    â€œHey Auntie Agnes! How’re you feelin?”
    She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn’t feel drunk.
    Auntie they were calling her. Affectionately, she wanted to think—not mockingly.
    So strange, these young people in her house! And her husband didn’t seem to be here.
    Strange, every day that he wasn’t here. That fact she could contemplate for long hours like staring at an enormous boulder that will never move.
    Strange too, she remained. She had not died—had she?
    There was her niece Kelsey and there was Kelsey’s friend Randi, and bony-faced Triste, and—was it Mallory, with the tattoos? She wasn’t sure. She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was not sad . These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss.
    If the plank were flat on the ground, you would not hesitate. You would smile, this crossing is so easy.
    But if the plank is over an abyss, you feel panic. You can’t stop yourself from looking down, into the abyss.
    Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
    Her young friends were watching her, and laughing with her. A silvery-haired woman of some unfathomable age