The Cleaver

It ended in fire and mud and the acquittal of all mortal obligations.

It began on an overcast Sunday morning, when the Levy family discovered that their mother had been replaced with an Italian woman from the Dark Ages. Cynthia and Leo, the Levy children, wandered downstairs to find her in the vaulted open-plan kitchen, muttering to herself and kicking the dog. With each kick, a clotted jigsaw of sores on her leg flexed open, liquid trickling from the joints in the mosaic. The trailing hem of her dress was plaqued with filth. She stopped kicking the dog and started hitting him with her fists. Captain, the family labrador, was arthritic and blind and received the blows like a sofa cushion. It seemed obvious to Cynthia and Leo that a substitution had occurred – their mother for this disintegrating hag from antiquity – but neither had the energy to think about how it had happened or what it could mean. They were cruel to each other instead.

‘Can you grow up and ask her to leave?’ asked Cynthia, twenty-one, head pinned to the kitchen counter. This morning she was recovering from a hangover and the suspicion that she had embarrassed herself the night before.

‘What if, for an exciting change, you did something yourself?’ asked Leo, seventeen and addicted to pornography. His tastes had become radical, and he was beginning to consume increasingly surreal material. His most recent fascination was a computer-generated film where two fat women peeled the skin off each other until they collapsed in a heap of glowing offal. Cynthia, unsure of the specifics but aware of the fetid shape of his obsessions, sneered into her hands.

Captain, now a collapsed soufflé of old skin and fur, dragged himself out of the kitchen with his two front legs. The woman rose and flapped her chapped lips towards the siblings. A black tongue churned in a well of oil.

‘Nice,’ said Leo, repulsed, even as his subconscious catalogued the tongue in its private library. The mood in the room was soured by the absence of breakfast. Usually on mornings like these the Levys were met at the kitchen island by a box of fragile pastries from the Viennese bakery near the train station – the product of their mother’s early morning labours, which also included walking Captain, doing Pilates in the dark on a sinister mechanical rack, and whatever it was she did to her hair to make it look unremarkable. Nobody else knew how to operate her chrome espresso maker, just as they were unable to use her juicer, her pasta roller, or the Korean rice cooker that looked like an alien missile. Leo experimentally pressed his finger into an old jar of Nescafé, then touched a few of the granules to his tongue. He grimaced.

Cynthia watched the woman pick at a wet scab on her palm and was overwhelmed by the injustice of going without coffee. ‘I’m going to kill her and then I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to kill myself,’ she wailed, sweeping her hair over her eyes. She was prone to these pointless outbursts of hyperbole, which she misunderstood as wit. Cynthia was firmly wedged at the bottom of her social pyramid, and this was precisely because she insisted on giving histrionic performances like these, in a flat voice that imitated those she heard on American podcasts, and because she often forgot to brush her teeth.

The woman stopped picking at the scab and stared directly into the centre of a halogen bulb in the ceiling. She tasted the air like a snake. Then she wet herself, and the urine splashed on the tile, and this made her laugh. Cynthia and Leo abandoned the kitchen island and moved to the door. The woman watched them retreat with a smile.

Cynthia and Leo’s father had been present for all of this, and indeed the urine lapped at the soles of his slippers. But Guy Levy was an anxious man who found conversation difficult, and even when they took place in his own home he entered social situations so cautiously he arrived to them late. He was like a container ship that needed to begin decelerating a mile out of port. Whenever he ventured into the conversation, it was often to the confusion of the room. His paunch swelled across the marble as he leaned on the counter. His thinning hair caught the morning light, creating a crown of golden, pubic wire.

‘I know that she is from the Dark Ages because of the fabric of her dress,’ he said, responding to a question that nobody had asked. Guy was a neurosurgeon during the week and, in the evenings, a self-taught expert on historical fabrics and a thousand other topics. He was not a hobbyist, unless one counted accumulating unrelated facts about unrelated subjects as a hobby. It was not as if he were a champion at trivia, the one arena where men who know a little about a lot can triumph, because he received questions as acts of violence. Nor did he use it to flavour or enliven conversation, because he was incapable of having one. It was not even that he derived a simple pleasure from knowing that the capital of Madagascar was Antananarivo, or that the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge was the longest in the world. It was simply that, in some deep place, the frail sense of identity that he possessed clung to the mistaken idea that other people valued him as a man who knew many things. His observation about the woman’s dress marked the first time in some time that any of this information had been useful. His children, used to finding everything about him irrelevant, did not notice. They were inoculated against finding any of it interesting, having spent their entire lives being just as uninterested in his ability to recite all of the stations on the Piccadilly line, the major battles of the Peloponnesian War, the details of the Indonesian revolusi, or the culinary traditions of the Mughal Empire.

‘Villana,’ said the woman, slapping her grey hands on the counter.

‘That could be her name,’ said Leo.

‘Villana!’ shrieked Villana. Then she started panting. Cynthia poured Villana a glass of water and handed it to her, stepping carefully around the mess on the floor. Villana snatched the glass and ran with it into the walk-in pantry.

‘Is that an Italian name?’ Cynthia asked, aroused beneath the veils of her hangover by the suggestion of international travel. The family travelled abroad at least once a year, but Cynthia had been a hanger-on on a supplementary trip last summer with two of her most beautiful friends. The three girls had visited Italy and Croatia. Cynthia’s involvement had been secured by her mother’s promise to pay for a week at an apartment in Bologna. While they had not been particularly fond of her to begin with, by the time they boarded the plane home the other girls hated Cynthia. They did not care for her nightly insistence on drinking until she was sick, which was the only way she knew of making herself feel like she was interesting, and for interrupting otherwise peaceful moments in churches and cobbled alleyways by providing live commentary on whatever she was looking at on her phone. This was not entirely Cynthia’s fault. The amphetamines prescribed to her for ADHD caused the words to pump through her veins and out of her mouth in an uninterrupted beam that she was often powerless to stop. Cynthia returned home convinced that the three of them shared an unbreakable bond. The other two screened her calls and called her the Lump behind her back.

‘I love Italy,’ said the Lump.

‘Italy doesn’t belong to you,’ said Leo, resuming an old argument at the precise moment it had caused Cynthia to storm out of her most recent birthday dinner.

‘I didn’t live in Italy, but I know it better than you,’ said Cynthia. And then, a cat-like look of pity on her face: ‘It’s totally fine that you don’t get what it means to understand another culture.’

‘You ate at the McDonald’s in Venice four times,’ Leo hissed.

‘Italia!’ screamed Villana. She emerged from the pantry and smashed a bottle of white wine vinegar against the wall. Then she froze, as if she were trying to divine meaning in the pattern the threads of pale liquid made as it ruined the wallpaper. None of the present Levys knew this, but the wallpaper was Japanese and had cost $600 per metre. Guy patted the air, calling for calm.

‘Italy didn’t exist in the Dark Ages, Villana,’ he said, sweetly. ‘Not in the form we recognise it, at least. It was a collection of fractured city states, ruled by powerful families, or the pope.’ Villana studied Guy’s weak chin.

‘You are not Italian,’ concluded Guy. ‘You’re pre-Westphalian.’

Villana purred dangerously.

Leo shook his head. ‘Telling her she isn’t Italian isn’t going to calm her down. She can be Italian, if that’s what she wants.’ And then, observing the straining of the face that preceded an involved contextual explanation from his father: ‘I don’t want to know what pre-Westphalian means.’

Guy looked over Villana’s head at his wife’s handbag, which hung as it usually did from a chair by the window. They watched Villana run through the open French doors and out into the garden. She stooped over the ornamental pond, plucked one of their mother’s imported fish out of the water, and sucked the eyes out of its head. A small figure of the Madonna slipped out of the folds of her filthy cassock and twitched in the air on a leather cord. She looked back across the water and smiled at the family, her open mouth filled with dead things.

—

Cynthia was hungry and suggested brunch. She took her mother’s wallet out of her handbag, which fell from its perch and into the urine. They left it there and drove everyone in their mother’s car to a fashionable café on the ground floor of a new apartment building. The tables were made of recycled wood, and the menu was full of things that would be familiar to people who had taken holidays to Japan. While they ate, Villana circled the perimeter of the dining room, making the sign of the cross at regular intervals.

‘What are we going to do with her?’ asked Leo. ‘She’s probably got diseases.’

‘You only think that because you don’t know what real people are like,’ said Cynthia, whose greatest insecurity, tied for first place among many others, was that she did not know what real people were like.

‘Santa Maria!’ Villana bellowed at the ceiling. A woman at the next table dropped her glass.

‘That is not a real person,’ said Leo.

Guy sucked a bead of egg yolk off his index finger. ‘We could put her up in the guest bedroom.’

‘Yes, we should do that,’ said Cynthia. She flicked a pepita seed off the table. ‘There’s no help available to people like her. It’s fucked.’

‘What people?’ murmured Leo. ‘Ancient Italians?’ He gnawed on a straw and watched his sister warily. Cynthia often raced past understanding in her eagerness to be seen handing out judgement. This led her to turn family occasions like these into strained battlefields where, feeling defensive and tearful at the mildest suggestion that she did not possess any of the relevant facts, she would find herself defending things she did not believe in, like the death penalty or incest. In short, she believed in many causes, but she often forgot what they were.

‘I’m not even sure if it’s Italian,’ said Guy. ‘It’s more likely an Italian dialect, or a related language, like Venetian or Ligurian. Depending on where she’s from, it might be mixed with fragments of French or German. Or any of a thousand extinct languages. It’s really very interesting. She’s a part of history.’ He was briefly more excited than he had ever been at any other moment of his life.

‘Okay,’ said Leo and Cynthia, repulsed. When Guy was stimulated, his voice became nasal and feminine. They failed to notice Villana staring at them from the far side of the room, chanting softly in a smoothie of dead languages. When she reached the end of the incantation, she stuffed all of her fingers into her mouth. Saliva ran down her knuckles. Her eyes were trained on the Levys, and she was thinking.

‘I guess she just lives with us until something happens,’ said Leo.

They lapsed into silence. Fidgeted, thought about other things, pushed fragments around their plates. Each thought briefly about the mother, resented her absence for the hole it left in the conversation. They were not interested in each other’s lives. They did not know enough about each other to try. That was her job.

‘Yes, she can stay with us,’ said Guy. ‘Just until your mother comes back.’

Villana returned to their table and crawled underneath it, where she pulled hair out of her scalp and wove it into a braid. She began to sing.

—

The Levys tried to live with Villana, and without their mother. At first, there was some pleasure to be found in watching Villana navigate domestic life. She laughed like she was being murdered. She ran like every bone in her body had been broken. She sang like a collapsing star. She tore the mattress in the guest bedroom open and slept inside it, her wretched body compressed and folded up among the springs. They ate meals together in the evenings, although Villana would only eat meat and drink only beer. They were kind to Villana, but they did not want a lot to do with her, because of the odour, and because she lashed out with her serrated nails like a sensitive cat when she felt disturbed, which was often, and for unknowable reasons. Three days went by and their mother did not return.

Cynthia, against all advice, was pursuing a law degree. She went to lectures and tutorials and irradiated the room with long statements disguised as questions that doubled back on themselves, revealing her inability to read, demonstrating that she had no understanding of where she was or why she was there, every word forcing itself out in a way that made her feel panicked and tearful. She ate lunches alone and, for a lack of anything else to do, checked her emails hundreds of times a day, waiting for someone to take an interest in her.

Usually, her mother coached her through this. She understood that her daughter was difficult and socially clumsy and terrified at her failure to imagine a future that included a scrap of happiness. Her mother understood that her role was not to care, to act as a companion of last resort, to file away at the jagged arrowhead of loneliness that Cynthia sometimes felt pressed to her neck. They went out for coffee a lot, shopped for clothes and watched television in the afternoon.

In a bathroom cubicle at school, Leo did lines of his sister’s prescription amphetamines off the chipped screen of his phone and ventilated himself on a glowing vape that tasted like bubblegum and hot plastic. He masturbated through lunch. Unlike his sister, Leo had hundreds of friends all over the world, and he communed with them late into the light in chatrooms where they showed him illegal videos that redesigned the circuitry in his brain.

His mother had not known what Leo did when he was alone, but she had known that it was unhealthy. She had dragged him out of the house dozens of times to feel the sunshine, to help her plant a shrub in the garden, to take the dog for a walk. These efforts, she knew, may or may not have changed the trajectory of things, but at the very least she could act as a tether between her son and the real world.

Guy was a successful surgeon. He had been a successful surgeon for so long that the specifics of what he was doing in the moment-to-moment sense no longer mattered: all of the thinking happened in his hands, leaving his mind free to wander through a field of unimportant facts. He could sometimes observe that his work had exacted a cost, paid for by his family, or more specifically his wife, who was left to manage everyone’s affairs at all times. The result of that bargain was that they had a lot of money, and that nobody, including himself, was interested in his inner life. His wife sometimes seemed frustrated that she was the only one who knew the vivacious, engaging man her husband had once been. It had not been a problem he could help her with. She had had to hold the memory of the man they had both thought he would be for both of them. In the evenings he read Wikipedia articles on major infrastructure projects until he passed out.

Villana prayed into the early hours of each morning with tears in her eyes, a boil pulsing on her forehead.

—

When Cynthia came home from class one afternoon, she was a balloon of self-pity. She had learnt that her friends were planning another trip, this time to Seoul, without the Lump. She found Villana in the driveway, beating the dead body of a pigeon on the hood of the car. Leo and Guy observed from the lawn.

‘She’s decided she doesn’t like the car,’ Guy said, testing the idea aloud, as Cynthia walked towards them.

‘Or the pigeon,’ said Leo.

It was an oppressive day, and steam seemed to rise out of the molten grass. The three Levys sweated in a neat, silent line, like nuclear scientists observing a test detonation. The bird’s hollow bones began to disintegrate, and the issuing viscera began to cook on the burgundy aluminium. Cynthia studied her brother and her father: they were blank, letting Villana and her sour smell and black moods wash over them. Her sympathy for Villana collapsed. So what if Villana was desperately troubled? So what if she had been bereft of certain privileges? So what if she had gone without a child psychologist or holidays to Vanuatu? Everyone had problems. Cynthia had monumental problems. Her traitorous friends, for one. She was getting only middling grades despite considerable effort. She could not convince anyone to take ecstasy with her, even though she had bought an enormous quantity of it. Her only ex-boyfriend had transitioned and was now better looking than her by every standard that mattered. Her dreams were being infected by the multi-layered symphony of carnal noises that passed through the wall she shared with her brother. She was not responding to these problems by imposing herself on the domestic life of a stranger’s family, or destroying the corpse of a bird all over the driveway. Cynthia approached Villana and tugged on her sleeve. The woman turned, face impassive behind a congealing mask of blood and bone.

‘You’re making a mess,’ Cynthia said, in a small voice. Villana ran her eyes across Cynthia’s tensile crop top and tiny lace socks. She dropped the pigeon, seized Cynthia by the shoulders, and snapped both collar bones with her thumbs.

—

‘This changes things,’ said Guy, staring at an old map of the USSR. When he wanted to feel calm, as he did now, he pulled out an enormous atlas and read it like it was a novel. The Levys were meeting at the kitchen island.

‘What does?’ asked Leo.

‘What do you think?’ asked Cynthia, whose arms were encased in casts and hanging in slings. ‘I want that bitch gone.’

‘What if she does it again?’ asked Guy.

‘Does what again?’ asked Leo, slurring slightly.

‘Are you high?’ asked Cynthia. Leo smiled at her, eyes slightly cross-eyed.

‘What if she commits another act of terrible violence?’ croaked Guy.

Cynthia wanted to call the police. Cynthia wanted the army to load Villana into a cannon and fire her at the moon.

Leo wanted to smoke so much weed his lungs collapsed. Leo wanted to spend eighteen hours in a Discord call with a man who would degrade him in a deep Slavic accent. Leo wanted to finally view a file called bigtime_snuff.mp4 that had been sitting on his desktop, cloaked in several anonymising folders, unopened, for eleven months.

Guy wanted everyone to know he could name every module on the International Space Station. Guy wanted his wife to tell them what to do.

We do not know what the Levy mother wanted, because she was not there.

Through the open window, they could hear Villana grunting as she tore all the plants out of the garden. She had been at it all morning, starting with the careful arrangements of ferns, which she hurled into the now-empty fish pond, itself turning into a cauldron of mud and dissolving plant matter. The Levys shuffled to the window and looked out at the backyard, now denuded of life but for the jacaranda in the centre. When the house had been designed, their mother had worked with the architect to make the jacaranda the focus of the design. From every window in the house one was afforded a new perspective on its outspread branches, reflected from below by the ornamental pond, and for a few magnificent weeks in spring the rooms were fed with a soft lavender light reflecting off the petals. The architect had told their mother that she had an incredible mind for this stuff. Villana sawed at the jacaranda with a breadknife.

—

Villana began to wear feathers in her hair, framing her sunken face in a bristling halo. The Levys were kept awake by wet, scuffling noises coming from beneath the floorboards, and eventually from within the walls themselves. Villana had found ingress to crawl spaces and ducts and voids that the Levys had not been aware of. One morning the family awoke to find themselves severed from the internet: Villana had destroyed the phone line. Leo shook with rage. Cynthia lay motionless on her bed for hours. Guy re-read the world atlas, and when this stopped producing its familiar satisfaction, a loose volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he found in a closet (Vol. 23, Light–Metabolism). They attempted to keep to their rituals: Cynthia went to university, Leo went to school, Guy went to work. On Saturday, Guy returned from the Viennese bakery with a tray of pastries, glowing with pride at this fatherly achievement, but Cynthia opened the tray and pointed out that the almond croissants were of no use because everyone on his side of the family, including both children and Guy himself, was allergic to almonds.

‘Okay,’ said Guy, thin lips pursed, resisting the sudden and overwhelming urge to beat his daughter to death, ‘but it was good of me to buy these all the same.’

Cynthia thought, not for the first time, that her father was not worthy of love.

Villana introduced her own rituals: she bowed reverentially to the air conditioner in the living room; washed her hands in an enamel dish she filled with heavy cream and a bottle of Chardonnay their mother had brought back from a trip to the south of France; she twisted sprigs of rosemary and clotted strips of lint from the dryer into dense bundles, which she lay on a tray and set alight, filling the house with the dead fragrance of burning hair. Guy and Cynthia and Leo began to bow to the air conditioner, to wash their hands in wine and cream, to light Villana’s foul, homemade incense. This did not seem to make her happy, but it did not make things worse.

—

‘She’s being a drag,’ said Leo, as they squatted on the cold floor of the garage, keeping their heads below the hood of the Škoda, lest Villana find them talking behind her back. She did not like it when they spoke to each other in low voices. They could hear her now, shuffling about in the living room. Lately, she had begun dragging in buckets of dirt and emptying them onto the carpet. It was one of several black developments. Most recently, Cynthia had found the eviscerated body of the pigeon stapled to the ceiling of her bedroom.

‘I wish Mum was here,’ said Cynthia.

‘Things can only get better,’ said Guy, and almost laughed.

—

Villana removed the front and back doors from their hinges and burnt them in the driveway. The house became cold and draughty. Long, segmented centipedes crawled out of the garden and traversed the soft furnishings. A gust of wind would lift dog hair and dust and powdery pieces of broken glass into a flinty vortex that filled the mouth and eyes. There was a lot of dog hair and dust because Villana had destroyed the vacuum cleaner, and all of the other electrical appliances, and there was a lot of glass because she had smashed all the light bulbs. The fate of the appliances could be traced to the actions of a large rat which, emboldened by the open doors, journeyed inside and chewed through the power cable behind the refrigerator. The current melted its flesh and fur down to a wide candied lump that they could not carve off the tile. The refrigerator died and the house smelt like brine and mould. Once she understood the connection between appliances and their power cables, Villana took a pair of gardening shears and destroyed the washing machine and the television and the German sound system. She smashed the lamps and crushed the recessed halogen bulbs in the ceiling with a broom, filling the carpet with shards of glass, which sank painlessly into the thick callouses on her soles.

Leo stopped going to school. He stayed in his room and tried not to look at the grey expanse of the useless computer screen. Mourned bigtime_snuff.mp4. He was not a fool. He knew he was poisoning his mind, spoiling his youth, sowing cancers that would sprout throughout adulthood. But it seemed unfair, to be severed from the life he had been leading and dumped instead in the swill pit of what was becoming Villana’s house. He remembered, with that powerful nostalgia available only to young people thinking of a time when they were even younger, drawing pictures of elves and wizards as a child and enjoying it greatly. The unrestrained pleasure of crafting was a reality entirely under his control. He found some coloured pencils and a sketching pad and tried to recreate the feeling. This did not work, and so instead he drew pictures of elves and wizards sucking each other off, triggering tectonic waves of sadness.

In the middle of a meeting with the parents of a 22-year-old patient, Guy lost his train of thought and began to list the capitals of the Swiss cantons. Between Schaffhausen and Schwyz, he came to his senses and coldly explained that there was no hope of treating the glioblastoma, and that the patient had at most a year left. As he undressed for bed that night he decided that he would not return to work.

Cynthia was relieved to be severed from the internet. She was glad that her phone was dead. Liberated from confirmation that other people were leading lives more interesting than hers, the Lump wandered around the house in her underwear and slings, drank milk from the carton, played with her belly button, read old picture books, cut all her jeans into shorts and all of her dresses into odd, loose crop tops.

Villana laboured tirelessly.

The Levy mother did not come back.

Nobody had seen Captain in weeks.

The house was dark and cold and disconnected from the world. The Levys lived on small strips of meat that Villana cooked, skewered on branches of the dead jacaranda. She worked atop the fish pond, now a midden of earth, broken plates, aluminium cans, sofa cushions and old DVDs. She seemed high above them, her face barely visible through silky curtains of smoke. The family assumed that some of what they were eating was Captain, but they were now too humiliated to venture out the front door. They took what they were given. Their unwashed clothes hung around their shoulders in dark strips. They were tattooed with cuts and bruises and lacerations, the product of Villana’s frustrations. It had been a time marked by violence and the cold and the disintegration of the house.

Cowering under the floorboards, they commiserated.

‘This has to stop,’ said Guy, dark pupils floating in pools of yellow cream.

‘I think she should leave,’ said Cynthia, giggling. ‘We could go overseas. We could go to Bologna.’

‘This is our house,’ said Leo, who was naked from the waist down. A deep wound on his forehead split open and blood ran down his nose, like a crying third eye. They exchanged these protests to each other in a scandalised whisper, heads bent together behind the garden shed. They had been meeting like this often, and the outcome was always the same: someone should do something. Someone should do something!

—

One night, whichever night it was, a storm crashed through the house. The carpet disappeared under a layer of cold water, snapped branches, fallen leaves. In the morning each room smelt of decomposition and damp wool. The Levys gathered in the lounge, observed the shattered television, the way the leather arms of the sofa had split open, revealing claw-like tangles of steel wire. The paint began to separate from the walls, peeling away in bubbling strips like the skin of a lizard. In the morning, Villana ushered them outside, using the tip of a kitchen knife to prick the backs of anyone who lagged. The garden was now a rectangle of sludge, arranged around Villana’s kitchen on the central platform of garbage and branches piled up in the fish pond. She left them and climbed up the mound, where she began to gyrate her hips in a menacing way. They stood below and looked at her feet.

‘Maybe Villana is our mother,’ said Leo, suddenly. ‘Maybe she went out for a walk late and night, and something horrible happened to her, and she lost her mind, and she came home and we did not recognise her.’

Guy and Cynthia could appreciate the desire Leo felt for clarification. Guy looked at Villana doubtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

‘She isn’t our mother,’ said Cynthia. It was a cold, silent morning, but for the rustling of Villana’s skirts as she undulated. Her lips twitched, silently incanting. The Levys looked for their mother’s face.

‘That is not our mother,’ whispered Leo. They were all discovering that they could not quite remember what their mother looked like. Her face slid in and out of focus, dissolved into something that bore the flat line of Villana’s nose, and the deep cleft in her chin, and the cast of her small, miserable eyes. A more forensic examination of the data was impossible, because Villana had burnt all of the photographs in the house.

—

‘Maybe Mother left because she didn’t like us,’ whispered Cynthia, her face red in the glow of the fire. The smoke stank of burning plastic and treated timber and frying carpet. The Levys were crawling in the mud. They moved industriously but without direction, like ants trapped in a plastic box.

‘Maybe Mother left us because we forgot she was here,’ said Leo. ‘Or she forgot we were here.’

The heat from the fire was intense in a way he did not know was possible. It was like his skin was pressed into the surface of the sun. They had all stripped down to their underwear, except for Leo, who could no longer find any that had not dissolved, and was naked.

‘Perhaps we did not do enough for her,’ said Guy.

Villana stood above them, on the plinth she had built atop the fish pond. Her hands rested on her hips, and she looked exultant. The Levy house was burning down, slowly but ferociously. The Levys did not care. The fact of their mother’s disappearance washed over them, cold and sharp. Each of them had the same thought: I have lost the only person interested in being my friend, for the crime of not knowing that this was what she was.

‘Oh, Mother,’ they cried. Slowly, they dragged their limbs through the mud, turning to look for Villana.

Villana ground the heels of her palms into her eyes. There were now-extinct parasites from long-dry rivers feasting on her amygdala. She leapt off the mound and ran a circuit of the garden. It started to rain. The bare dirt softened underfoot. She would plant barley in the autumn, and sugar beets in the spring. The barley would rot and the beets would be eaten by sparrows. She would roast a whole pig and she would feed it to the ducks. She would scoop mud out of the flowerbed and eat it by the handful, revelling in something she couldn’t describe. She hated it here, and then she loved it, and she would be dead by Christmas.