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words. They simply stand there for a beat, staring at each other and smiling, until Hilary says, “Okay, on that note, if you’re truly okay…” She pauses until Harper nods. “I really need to go.” She looks down at her arm, as if a wristwatch is looking back up at her, and nods her head. “Yeah, it’s closing in on fuck-I’m-late o’clock.”
    “It’s a good thing you own the place, then, huh?”
    “Love you.” Hilary leans in and kisses Harper’s cheek before heading for the door, hollering over her shoulder, “Call if you need me.”
     
    When Hilary leaves and the house is still, Harper wanders down to the kitchen to put on a kettle for tea. As it heats on the stove, she leans over the sink, her palms flattened on either side of the stainless steel, and stares vacantly out the window in front of her. It’s a brisk December day—she can tell in the fog of the window and in the way the branches of the bare trees sway softly in the wind. She thinks if she listens hard enough, she’ll be able to hear their groaning protests, but all she hears is the growl of her stomach. As the kettle screams, she pops bread into the toaster and stares at that instead.
    After she’s eaten and the wind has died down, Harper ventures outside to fetch the morning paper and reads it over her second cup of chai. On cup three, she finishes the crossword puzzle, folds up the paper, and sets her dishes in the sink. As she walks out of the kitchen, the clock on the stove tells her it’s barely eight o’clock, and she sighs as she scales the staircase and returns to her room.
    Harper’s feet still just inside her bedroom doorway and she looks over the space with a discerning eye, as she imagines her mother did hours earlier. Her desk is on the right, and the heavy oak and the pens, books, and trinkets that line it are all coated in a thin layer of dust. To her left sits her queen size, four-poster bed, with its sheets twisted beneath her crumpled blanket. She can’t recall the last time she washed her sheets and she strips the bed before she loses her drive, and hastily descends the stairs with the linen bundled in her arms. She shoves them into the washing machine and returns to her room with a rag, a bottle of all-purpose cleanser, the vacuum, and the intent to clean.
    It takes her a lot less time than she thought it might and by a quarter to nine, her room is restored to its once standard luster. She sits in the middle of her floor, the freshly vacuumed high pile carpet soft on the backs of her thighs, and stares out the quartet of bow windows on the far wall and sighs. She can’t at all figure out how she’s spent her waking hours for the last three months of her life. She can’t recall doing much more than a little reading and cooking, a lot of napping and crying, and she can’t understand how those things filled a day, let alone multiple days and weeks, months. She can feel herself crossing a line, turning a corner. She’s restless and craving more than just existing.
    Making a living seems close enough to living itself, or so Harper reasons. She tosses her Meat and Eat uniform onto her bed and heads across the hall, immediately turning the shower knob to full heat. As the bathroom fills with a warm mist, she discards her ratty clothing and steps into the shower. The near-scalding water flows over her skin, turning it crimson, and she listens as it beats rhythmically against the vinyl shower curtain. It’s hypnotizing, the feel and sound of it, and she wonders how she went so long without the simple indulgence of daily showers. Slowly, she washes her body and hair, then stands beneath the stream, making up for lost time, until the water runs cold. The bathroom is still warm despite the water losing heat, and she steps out of the basin without bothering to grab a towel. Through the steam, she catches sight of her distorted reflection in the fogged, full-length mirror on the backside of the door. She’s blurred and