Sophia cannot help knowing what she knows. She is standing in her beautiful open floor-plan kitchen in her perfect sprawling house holding the tip of a human finger.
CORTLAND
14.??Smoking of any substance and drinking of spirits by female Residents are not permitted due to possible damages incurred to the Property.
15.??If approached by the Association’s Representatives, Residents will behave with decorum and deference, providing any documents, evidence, testimony, or information requested, and executing with promptness any and all solicited action（s）。
CAMEO
The moon melts in through the big bay windows of 1 Cedar Drive like cold butter over hot bread. Nightingales and whip-poor-wills and kingfishers tune up their throats as a gentle mist lifts from the street into the summer night.
Sophia wakes. She fell asleep on the couch, too afraid to go up to that massive bed where the shadows looked like long fingers reaching for her in the moonlight. She looks down across the landscape of her drowsy body and sees that a tiny grey field mouse has curled up in the arch of her naked foot. Its round ears twitch with dreams of clover and owls.
Sophia stares. She does not leap away. It has the right to sleep in what shelter it can find, poor thing.
“Go on,” she whispers, and moves her toes ever so little.
The field mouse opens its black eyes. It does not leap either. It watches her. It leans warmly, possessively against her foot. It opens its mouth.
A shadow falls across Sophia’s belly in the shape of a curved knife. She looks up unbreathing and she is not alone, not even so alone as a woman with a mouse. A heron stands outside her window, a waterbird as tall as a man, its fish-shredding beak pointed at her heart, the blue of its feathers glowing like wet ink in the first drops of sunlight. It taps the glass with its beak. Harder, harder, until it is not a tapping but a stabbing. A spiderweb of broken glass pops open. The heron opens its mouth. A long hiss rises up from its gullet.
Give it to me, rasps the heron. It is impossible, impossible, and yet the eyes of the creature are the every-colored eyes of Mr. Semengelof. It speaks with the voice of the music teacher. Pure song. Pure pity. Give it to me and I will take it away forever.
Sophia’s muscles thicken with the rigor of horror. She cannot move. She cannot get away. She cannot understand. She tries to obey, but she is so afraid.
Give it to me and I will take it not only from your house but from your mind. It will not trouble you again. You will not even remember that it troubled you at all.
The field mouse blinks its beautiful eyes. It’s okay, it whispers. It’s best this way. You don’t deserve it.
The bird stops. It jerks its sleek head toward the door and flies away in one long fluid unfurling of wing and intent. Enough. But it has shown it can get to me, Sophia thinks. It can get to me whenever it wants.
The mouse has fled just the same.
Her husband enters the house without knocking, as he always does. Drops his things on the foyer floor without a care.
“I am home! I am here! Where is my wife?”
Sophia is on her feet and in his arms in the same fluid unfurling movement as the heron’s ascent. It is him, it is him, and there can be nothing wrong now, how stupid she’s been, how young and small and reckless with herself. Her husband holds her so tight. His arms dwarf her, envelop her, the most exquisite suffocation. He smells of growing greens and blackberries and ripe hops and deep, tilled, tended earth. And a little of blood and milk and musk, always, yes, of the animals he works with, their bodies and their breath and their hot, quick life. No smell excites Sophia more than this.
“My love, my love,” she whispers.
His big hand cups her head, strokes her long hair, and then he wants her, of course he does, and she wants him too, his kisses and his strength and his warmth and his need.
Your Needs Are Our Wants.
“Are you happy, Sophia?” he whispers urgently as he devours her.
He says her name over and over, until it no longer sounds like her name at all, but someone else’s, and for a moment, Sophia could swear it is someone else’s name. Other vowels and other consonants, strangers in the halls of her ears. But she shakes her head against his chest and the moment floats away. The world is Sophia again. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia. The tickle of his breath in the curve of her neck; the tickle of the field mouse’s fur on the curve of her foot; the tickle of the glass breaking beneath the heron’s beak.
“You are happy, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“Yes, my darling,” Sophia sighs, and she is not lying. Not yet. The mingling of their breath is a biome in which only the truth can thrive. “Yes.”