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own denial as a terrible sentence that he alone must unfairly endure. If her mood lightened, which it did sometimes in the afternoon, he felt a searing rage. And when, at night, fatigue caused her to repeat the words
dead … dead
over and over again, he felt a calmness fall over the house. At these times he also felt joy.
    A walk through the kitchen for him contained enough signs of their other life together that he sometimes ate out for several days in a row to avoid being confronted by a past that, as the doctors had said, could be expected to return someday — changed, reduced, perverse. This was what frightened the detective the most.
The return.
    After her third stroke Ellen’s therapy began to take, and her progress exceeded the expectations of the specialists. She was able to go out and shop for groceries, provided that she rehearsed the shopping list before heading off. Ellen prepared for these outings tirelessly, and except for the occasional tantrum, usually triggered by having to make an unexpected decision, she wassuccessful: decision making was often accompanied by terrible sensations.
    Each shopping list disappeared from her when it was discarded. Along with it, the domestic life signified by the taxonomy was also lost. Ellen experienced these words and lists as thick, heavy blanks and their weight pulled at the muscles in her back. In order to make the words bearable she cored them with noise, a bright, prickling noise that vacuumed the area inside and immediately around them. Doing this, she was able to lift herself from the couch or walk into the kitchen.
    Soon, as she stood in front of a stack of frozen fish or sat over a pile of unsigned documents, Ellen began detailing, with a meticulousness and energy she had never known, a catalogue of seals, made hermetic by the new shoots that were growing off the signs of her world. A pentagram of signatures burned against the side of a trout, its eye a frozen pea, the “P” that begins her last name.
    A tomato was told to keep all of the events of her life before the stroke beneath the sheen of its skin. It was obedient.
    In her tomato, in one of its tiny translucent seeds, Ellen has every plot of land she ever sold. Stored there are her various machines for telling the future.
    She now studies future images in the afternoon, before the sun abandons her to suicide, and she translates them, using another set of machines sealed between the halves of an adjacent seed. Many of the images depict scenes of murder, but Ellen knows they only shock her to get her attention.
    Occasionally, however, she will open a seal and a brief piece of song or snippet of conversation will make her laugh at some discrepancy. This is the mischief of her seals and machines.

10
A Bull Market
    Ellen bites the tip of her tongue to squeeze the coffee from it and she tastes blood the moment she drops her mug. The sound of the mug as it spins and stops, hitting the leg of the table, causes her to cry. She bunches up the cold wet of her shirt and pushes her fists into her mouth. She clenches her eyes shut, feeling the blankness of the event scare her, and she hears the voice of a little girl in her mouth.
    Detective Peterson hears his wife’s strange sobs and he pounds up the stairs, remembering as he gets to the top:
Don’t make a big deal of this, don’t make a big deal of this.
When he reaches the television room Ellen is holding herself tightly, straining to keep the voice from her throat. The detective slips in beside her and gently loosens the knot of her arms. He guides her head onto his shoulder and encourages her to cry. She does, and it’s the cry of a grown woman, full of softness for the little girl who is so scared. While he rocks his wife Detective Peterson realizes, without guilt, that none of this is Ellen’s fault. He says, “Is banned, in cape.” She looks up, grateful for the words; restored, she feels his affection diminish the barrier. The detective has failed to