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and the other across the back of her neck. He attempts to shush her, but his teeth are too wet and his bottom lip is too sloppy.
    The Honeymoon in Aphasia is over.
    Detective Peterson’s difficulties speaking have spread out to his face, and now, in his panic, he feels that he must escape through the only door left open: his own mouth.
    Ellen scrambles to resurrect the barrier between them —
He is sick, really sick
— and she rolls her tomato backwards from the corner of her mouth, subtracting the afternoon.
Something is wrong with my husband. He’s holding my head like a newspaper.
The detective drops Ellen’s head from his hands, giving her neck an assaul­tive twist, and he leaps from the couch. He pulls a painting off the wall and throws it across the television. Ellen has a sudden impatience with her own disorder and she belts her better self into action. She rises off the couch.
He’s willing to break his own neck to stop me.
She pushes her husband back against the wall and runs up the hall and down the stairs.
    Before she can reach the bottom her husband’s body rolls against the backs of her legs. She knows the level this has reached. So fast.
He’s going to break his neck to stop me.
Ellen sweeps aside her disability with a flat hand on her husband’s back and she vaults over his pommel horse body. The detective spins and swipes at her ankle before she reaches the door.
    The man on the other side enters the scene by slamming his body against the barrier. Ellen has rolled out of the way and the new man in her life is wrapped around the old one. The uniform pulls his head back to take in what he holds in his arms. No time. A hot mouth clamps onto his lips and sinks its teeth to close them. The uniform feels the power of an industrial press punching into the centre of his face.
    Ellen scuttles backwards down the hall, and as her husband flicks his head she hears the snap of both men’s necks breaking. The detective drops the body to the ground and he turns his damaged upper torso toward Ellen. His mouth is full and he releases the contents down his shirt, hissing across bloody teeth. His bottom lip jumps up to make a consonant but falls short and swings slack across his chin. He sways his head, grinding the break in his neck. Ellen thinks she sees a wolf appearin shadow across the back of his throat and she fires at the blue moon of his uvula.
    The already taxed anatomy of the detective surrenders utterly to the bullet and his head lifts from his shoulders; clear of them, it flips like a coin. The head drops to the floor, sitting against the door on the empty sock of its neck, and looks directly at Ellen. The look, though inanimate, is fresh with the experience of abjection, of failure. This look, familiar to the followers of zombies, is not entirely new to Ellen either. And if she weren’t so tightly packaged with terror she would, probably, cry.

12
Fish and Boy
    The long pier in Port Perry floats its spine out into Lake Scugog, and among its ribs bob long sanitary sailboats with their own spare and polished spines. Seagulls lead each other’s capes in and off the tips of these skeletons, keeping the temperature just past winter with their cries. A great deal of soap floats in white castles out from the orange waterlines of the boats and they repel the surface slicks of gasoline like poles meeting. A boy wearing an outsized captain’s hat that loops off his head sits on the edge of a boat watching the patterns of gasoline as they leap clear on the smooth woven surface of the water. A giant goldfish, in fat flames, appears below. The boy catches his breath. The carp is almost as big as he is. The two creatures hang in the air marvelling at their equal volume, sharing the suspension, the yellow light of gills and the white ring of an ankle. The carp leans off the surface and carries its glow to the bottom, disappearing from the boy, who looks up at the seagulls that have brought their paper flight to within