The co-worker’s house stood like the final rook in a chess game. The rest had been demolished by the city. Muddy meadows stretched in every direction, islands of shopping carts, lawn chair piecemeal, plastic bags floating in the soppy brown morass. Inside the house was no different, but with half-witted furnishings and receptacles. My coworker greeted me with tender shock, then stationed me at the kitchen table with a cup of cold coffee.

“Give me what you think I deserve,” she said.

I looked at her, but said nothing. I am not one of those women who can rise above an obvious mess to make someone feel good. “I suppose we all get what we deserve in the end,” I mumbled.

“It’s an important moment,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “And you’re here.”

She arranged two small wooden chairs into a face-off and sat in the rear one, her legs spread down onto the seat. I untied my woolen pant leg and let it fall between my swollen ankles. I pulled out the eye and lip smears, the bottled beiges and black brush tar and the thin paint sticks, ordered them in my chest pocket like scalpels. My co-worker leaned forward. When I reached to touch her face, our bulges pressed together. In a glance, I saw that she’d known all along; even felt sorry that I hadn’t mentioned it.

“That place is a purgatory,” she said, drawing on her cigarette. “We’re all waiting to be dropped into something else, one way or the other.”

I smeared liquid beige into the minor craters, the magenta capillaries, the pocks, the cat bite, the jagged cicatrice perforating her eyelid. Heavily coated, hers looked like a prosthetic of a face.

“That’s why I don’t mind old people,” she said. “They’re in the same boat as me.”

I thickened black paint over the cicatrice. “Why did you want me here?”

“I don’t know.” She lit a cigarette. “Something told me you wouldn’t fuck with me.”

I lit the tip of the coral crayon and the Kittenliver pencil and rubbed the melt into a paste on my palm. I rubbed and rubbed into my veiny underbelly of nerve endings and sinews, feeling flimsy and exasperated and humid in my primal duct. I patted it onto her cheekbones and the flat of her forehead.