We stood in the walk-in refrigerator, shivering. She opened a metal door in the wall, exhibited a cavern of lipid-shaped ice. Inside was a box of Junior Mints. “Don’t tell no one.”

I held out my hand.

“You got some pretty hair too,” she said, pulling a frizzled clump from my hairnet.

I removed my face everyday before leaving the nursing home. Still my husband caught a glittery residue, prodded me for sex. Soon, the zipper in my white uniform appeared to be separating. I started exiting the house before daybreak to vomit under the neighbor’s Douglas Fir. The act became so habitual, I hung a teacup on its scaly branch, brought out a kettle of peppermint tea. When the morning sickness ceased, I still made my way to the fir; I needed to smell the pitch, to feel its hairy branches around me, to see how the teacup sometimes blocked the rising moon, sallow light flooding around it.  

My husband barely left the stove. Nights, he cooked cream soups from an 18th century tavern recipe book, a perfect alibi for my robust figure. He’d leave home only to go two blocks to the convenience store to slip circles of bologna from plastic-wrapped deli sandwiches into his pockets. Later, he peeled them into strips, added them to the soup. We shared bulbous cans of beer, conspicuously avoided the bolts in my clothes, the leaks on my smock. 

By the time my coworker’s to-do arrived, my own predicament threatened to steal the spotlight. I wrapped my torso in the woolen pant leg packed with make-up, tied it at my tailbone so my rounded frontside appeared to sink below my crotch. I sheathed myself in a rectangle of red corduroy with a square pocket doubled over my chest. Tight as a bullet, my entire being was dedicated to the task of deflecting its own obvious state. I’d become cylindrical for the sake of my entrance—the only moment that ever matters.