Everything must be contained now. I wipe down the cabin’s interior, the wooden beams, and the bathroom’s warped mirrors. I am unsure why I am moved to do this, but it does feel like actions a guilty party would take and so I luxuriate in the task, in each small gesture surrounding the potential disintegrating future. My robe smells of aquatic intestines and my inflated breasts leak through the fabric. I bite off all my fingernails, cracking my neck repeatedly as I pluck clumps of ratted hair from my scalp to knot into fishing lures. Resting my head against the arm of the sticky sofa, the heat from the afternoon sun tumbles from the picture window.

I trace circles of light on the ceiling with my outstretched tongue as they float from one corner of the room to another, listening for police sirens approaching in the distance. In frantic moments I cower in the bedroom closet, the smell of Bunny’s garments surrounding me as I envision slovenly country officers, their wrinkled uniforms covered in crumbs, taking too much pleasure in the frisking of my body. The potential discomfort of coming across my name in an article with a headline exposing creeps lurking around well-kept neighborhoods at night lingers. I do not feel guilty, exactly. In fact, I never feel much of anything anymore, aside from an occasional residue of unease or annoyance, a lingering suspicion that will not fully come into focus. A feeling that I am not feeling enough. I cannot recall a time when I did, though I am sure there was in the past. Unless I am innately this way, a bit off from the start. It would account for me hardly noticing the later absence, like a baby born without a limb, or a baby not born at all.

My muscles perpetually tense, adrenaline pulsing. Sleeping little allows me to fill my time in other ways. One event rolls into the next with occasional gaps, nothing a conscious choice. The light fades across the lake as I wade into the shallow next to the dock. My legs stiffen and kick out in straight lines. My spine remains painfully erect as I bend at the waist, my hard swollen stomach grazing the surface and head straining to hover above. I plunge my face into the green water, an involuntary spasm, surfacing when I can no longer breathe. Then I submerge again. It is murky underneath, denser than the woods. The third time, I dive with my mouth wide, landing in a school of minnows. Tiny salt scales trace the edges of my brow. A fin brushes against my nose, my lips, and the interior of my cheek. Clicking my teeth shut, I clench my jaw, trapping the slick wriggling thing. Flipping my head back out of the wake, I swallow it whole.

The refrigerator is stocked with fresh kills, small creatures and insects wrapped in newspaper and placed in Tupperware. I mold aspics from recipes in worn cookbooks, stuffing myself on jellied perch, duckling, and pickled frog. I drop bricks of cheese into the fondue pot until it is tipping over with liquid. Drowning the bodies of crickets and white grubs in oil, I fry them in a skillet, using the crunchy exoskeletons to shovel the steaming yellow slime into the endless hole of my mouth.

“Juiciest part,” I say aloud to the dog sleeping beneath the table.

All this wanting within me stirs an appetite that is vast and formless, and that I have no idea how to sate. Desiring objects, edible or otherwise, is a substitute for desiring people, but what does one fill this space with if longing does not exactly take the shape of either?

Once after dinner together, Bunny and I sat in the near dark on her plastic couch, playing Gin Rummy and listening to the radio. A program about a man who walked into the bush and went missing. Years later, they found him in New Zealand, milking cows. He had arranged his own disappearance and fled to escape a conviction of tax evasion.

“Can you imagine?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her gaze locked outside the window, on something beyond the lake.