Here are 3-4 sentences of pure scene continuing from the bathroom sink beat:
The cotton round comes away the color of weak tea, and she sets it on the left side of the sink, not the right, the way she always does. The ceramic dish - a lopsided oval, glazed in her daughter's favorite purple - age nine - has a chip on the rim now that her thumbnail finds automatically. She uncaps the glass bottle and the smell of it, something between cucumber and nothing at all, fills the bathroom the way it has filled every bathroom she's stood in since the year her mother died. Four pins go in, same four fingers, same order - and she looks at herself for exactly as long as she needs to, and then she stops.
The pot is dented on the left side from the time she set it down too hard the night her sister called with bad news, and she has never once thought to replace it. The burner catches on the third click, always the third, and she rests two fingers on the edge of the stove the way other people rest a hand on a shoulder. The yellow box has a torn corner she folded herself six months ago to keep it closed - and the tea bag's paper tag says something in French she has never looked up. She doesn't watch the water; she watches the window above the sink go dark with steam.
The mug goes on the wide armchair arm, not the side table, because the side table wobbles and she learned that in a different apartment in a different year. The book falls open to 214 on its own now, a reflex of paper, and the crease there's soft as skin. A bus passes and the window glass shivers once and goes still - and the streetlight lays a yellow strip across the rug that she has watched move toward the wall every night as winter gets later. She tucks her feet up without thinking, the left one under, the right one out, the way she has always done it, the way no one else has ever seen.
The screen throws a blue square onto the ceiling and she watches it there instead - the way she used to watch headlights cross her childhood bedroom wall. The urgent flag is a red dot the size of a lentil and she knows this without looking because she designed the icon herself, three jobs ago, in a conference room with bad lighting. Her thumb moves once toward the armrest and stops, and the mug warms the underside of her wrist where the pulse is. The chat fills with names she will answer in the morning, in different clothes - in a different room, and the blue square on the ceiling shrinks and goes out and she doesn't move to bring it back.
The mug goes upside down on the rack beside the blue one, rim down, handle out, the way it has nested there so many times that the rubber mat has a faint ring where it lands. She turns off the kitchen light and the refrigerator hum fills the room the way water fills a glass. The hallway is twelve steps and she has never counted them - only her feet know, left hand trailing the wall past the thermostat she stopped adjusting years ago, past the hook where her coat hangs by one shoulder. The dark at the end of it's hers.
The paperback is face-down at 231, spine cracked a little further than it was, and the lamp is still on - its pull-chain swaying the smallest amount in the draft from the vent. Her reading glasses are on top of it, folded, the left arm crooked the way it goes when she sets them down without looking. The blanket is up to her chin and her feet are still the same - left one under, right one out - and the mug is on the wide arm of the chair in the other room, empty - handle facing the window.
The water stain above the left corner of the bed is a running dog, has been a running dog since the February she moved in and lay on her back on the bare mattress waiting for the movers to bring the box spring. She finds it without turning her head, the way a tongue finds a loose tooth. Outside, someone laughs once - a man's voice, cut off by a car door - and the sound arrives and leaves the way sounds do when they belong to someone else's night. She pulls the blanket another inch and the lamp throws the same pale circle it has always thrown - and the dog runs nowhere, same as always, and she lets her eyes go soft until it blurs.
The ceiling fan has three speeds and she only ever uses the middle one, the switch left at the same angle since the summer she figured out it didn't rattle there. A siren starts somewhere past the park and moves north through the neighborhood and she follows it with her eyes closed, past the dry cleaner - past the school, until it goes under the sound of the fan and disappears. Her hand finds the edge of the fitted sheet where it pulls loose at the corner and she holds it, not to fix it, just to hold it, the cotton gone thin and soft as paper from two years of wash. The dog above the lamp runs - and she breathes out, and the room doesn't ask her anything.
The night-guard is in the glass of water on the nightstand, the way it has been every night since the dentist said the word *bruxism* and she drove home with her jaw clenched the whole way.
She lifts it out with two fingers, the same two, and the water runs down her wrist and she lets it.
The plastic is warm from sitting in the room - and it fits the way it only ever fits after the first few months, when it stopped feeling like something borrowed and started feeling like part of her face.
She sets the empty glass back without looking, and her hand knows the coaster, the small square of cork she bought at a shop she can't remember in a city she visited alone.
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The cotton round comes away the color of weak tea, and she sets it on the left side of the sink - not the right, the way she always does. The ceramic dish - a lopsided oval, glazed in her daughter's favorite purple, age nine - has a chip on the rim now that her thumbnail finds automatically. She uncaps the glass bottle and the smell of it, something between cucumber and nothing at all - fills the bathroom the way it has filled every bathroom she's stood in since the year her mother died. Four pins go in, same four fingers, same order, and she looks at herself for exactly as long as she needs to, and then she stops.
