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    ROB
     
    “Scrape’s fucking broken.”

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    MANNY & TESSA
     
    “You awake?”
    “Kinda.”
    “Think anyone else is?”
    “Probably.”
    “I’m too tired to sleep.”
    “Me too,” Tessa says, “isn’t that funny? I’ve never been too hungry to eat, but when I’m beat like this, I just fidget and toss.”
    “I used to always have to pretend I’d been hurt.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know,” Manny says. “Like wounded or, like, sick.”
    Both Manny and Tessa giggle.
    “Like, I’ll pretend I’m an old-time soldier, been shot and in a military hospital with all kinds of dying men around me, and the smell of medicine, and people fighting to save their legs from amputation, and that I’m just there and bandaged and listening to the nurse wheel carts around from bed to bed.”
    “You’re fucking crazy,” Tessa says.
    “Maybe,” says Manny. “But sometimes it works.”
    Both Manny and Tessa lie there, their minds packed with the noise imagined from military hospitals.
    Manny falls asleep.

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    TESSA
     
    She thinks about nurses, soldiers gut shot and bleeding.
    She thinks smells—antiseptic, urine.
    The noise of pain, low grunts emitting from the wounded. Whispers to gods and mothers and girlfriends.
    One soldier’s hand drapes from the side of his bed. From the tip of his index finger, dark blood drips into a pool on the tile floor. His hand is reflected in the pool, and each time a bead of blood increases the perimeter of the puddle, ripples distort the reflection, the blood shimmies iridescent.
    There is a cart. Rusty wheels. A white clad nurse pushes it, and a sort of song emits. Her black shoes against the white tile in time, the sing song whine of rusty wheels spinning. Fluorescents flicker. A lullaby to Tessa.
    And then she’s asleep.

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    TIM
     
    Tim’s phone is near dead, but he lays beneath the covers looking at the nude pictures he’s accumulated.
    Some of the girls, he can’t even remember their names. Girls he met at rodeos and girls he knew from high school and some women that he’d known from church and some of his mother’s friends and friends’ mothers and sisters of people he’d worked with.
    He liked his picture collection, but it also made him feel sick.
    What was wrong with him? Why was he so foul-minded?
    In high school he’d had a girlfriend who’d told him he was a “good one.” That’s what she had said. She’d called him kind. She’d called him sweet.
    She went away to school. She didn’t call like she said she would.
    A few Christmases later, Tim was at Rudy’s, a bar that’s now closed.
    She was there. The girl. She had a guy with her, and the two came up to Tim, and the girl introduced Tim to the new guy by saying, “This is my friend Tim.”
    Friend Tim.
    Friend Tim.
    Tim scrolls through his pictures.
    Chubby girls and black girls and white girls and girls with soft, full breasts, and girls with small tits, nipples the color of almonds.
    Tim’s phone says: 10% Battery.
    Tim looks at a few more pictures.
    Tim turns off his phone.

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    BLUE
     
    Blue is drunk.
    Blue is snoring.
    Blue’s too drunk to dream.
    Or too drunk to remember.
    His dreams in the morning.
     

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    MORNING
     
    Tap.
    Tap. Tap. Tap.
    Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
    “Hear that?” asks Old Burt.
    “A branch?” says Blue. “The wind?”
    Tap. Tap. Tap.
    “Too constant,” says Mindy.
    They all sit up. Panic upon them.
    “Someone look out the window,” says Tessa.
    “You look,” says Blue.
    “Ain’t you just a fucking man,” says Mindy.
    “Never claimed to