Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend. Diagonal to them a woman gnaws on a heavily oxidized apple, gagging slightly as she bites into the core. This is not the first time Eileen has seen her. This woman is on the bus so often that Eileen wonders if she is an apparition or lives in the dusty backseat of metrobuses. With the price of rent in New York, Eileen couldn’t blame her. As usual, the woman looks like she has cried all morning. Moisture glistens on her weathered skin. Eileen finds herself staring at people often. She could easily watch a person for hours, like a movie. Not because they are beautiful or striking, but more with a fascination of what each of their resting face looks like – unbothered, sad, disgruntled or downright antagonistic. Most people’s faces do not always look like their reflection. It’s a bit like catching yourself in a store window, unguarded, and it always leaves you disgusted. Eileen still remembers the first time she discovered her profile and silhouette as a kid, after years of looking at her face frontward. Slouched posture, and a humongous head – she looked like a bent spoon. For days afterwards she avoided mirrors.

The slow crawl of the bus causes a knot of nausea and hunger in her stomach, and she tries to look straight through the front window of the bus. She once read that motion sickness was caused by the difference in perception due to the movement of the surrounding cars and your own immobility and that it helps if you look far ahead instead of around you. Her head is filled with such random facts and half-formed thoughts instead of anything substantial. She flaunts them to convince people she is well read. She only has a shallow understanding of most things, though, and people eventually see through her. Then they either find her ramblings endearing or dismiss her entirely, like her ex-husband. His inability to tolerate her nonsense was one of the most telling signs of the end of their marriage. Last she checked, he thinks she is the closest thing to a con artist, scamming people not out of their money but their time.

The bus stops at a gas station and the driver, a middle-aged woman, waddles out to the restroom. Eileen feels a bout of anger at her deliberate slowness. She is going to be late. Most things out of her control anger her. If she had to walk, she wouldn’t feel this angry; she wouldn’t even hurry. Eileen’s unrest lingers until her stop arrives, which she almost misses. She yanks on the stop cord and yells twice at the driver to stop. The boys at the front of the bus stare at her, and the pink button down rolls his eyes, now at her. It’s amazing how versatile teenagers are. She reminds herself that people in general are versatile, switching sides so quickly you’d end up with a crick in your neck trying to keep up. She passes the boys, careful not to lose balance, half-expecting one of them to stick out their leg. Her biggest nightmare is being laughed at by a group of teenagers, as trite as that sounds. She exits without thanking the driver.

The building is lime colored, cracked with fissures like the surface of the moon. She takes comfort in its ugliness. Inside, Eileen is confronted by a receptionist with a lazy eye who looks immediately irritated on seeing her. She hands her a form and says, ‘Fill this out,’ one eye looking past Eileen’s shoulder. The form goes on and on about HIPPA, informed consent and insurance, all stuff in small print. After filling it out, she thumbs through Instagram. She flicks down and refreshes for new stories, an action attributed to muscle memory. Edits of celebrities, recipes, five-minute hacks… She liked one post, and her feed is filled with similar ones, like her grid is a collective sentient being observing her. The reels are endless. She wonders if it really is infinite. If it really does have a lifetime supply of reels, could she keep scrolling and never run out? A modern-day equivalent of a rabbit hole, brain rot. She shakes her head at how pretentious she sounds. If not Instagram, she would be stuck on Twitter, Reddit, or the cesspool of her own mind. At least Instagram is entertaining.

When she is finally called for her appointment, the room she is led to smells vaguely like baby powder and Canadian bacon. A bluish-gray rug in the middle looks like a washing machine’s lint residue rolled into a sheet. The woman inside the room does not fit the profile her sister had sent her. In the photo, she had a middle part that made her look like an old schoolteacher who would flick her tongue as she flipped through notes that had immediately aroused Eileen’s disgust. She had planned on using that baseline disgust to get through the session uninhibited. Now, the woman’s jet-black hair is voluminous and coiffed, two strands framing her face. Eileen is sure that if she were to gather it in a hair tie, it would only have to be twisted twice to achieve this hold. A weird observation, but hair has always been a sore spot for Eileen since her own is sparse with no errant strands to spare.

‘How do you do? I’m Zahra Amin.’

Her features are small and subtle, like mere sketches on paper. She looks feline and secretive, like she knows more than she lets on. Already, Eileen finds herself reevaluating the rug color. Maybe it was chosen because when it got dirty, it wouldn’t be visible, like those people who’ve always had gray hair and so never look old.

‘Did you have trouble finding the building?’ she asks, arranging the beige boucle chairs so that they face each other. Eileen shakes her head, and then worries if it was meant to be rhetorical. The building’s pockmarked face is so inconspicuous it is hard to miss. She sits on the edge of her seat, her legs tense. She has to stop herself from bouncing them. Eileen feels it is imperative to appear as normal as possible, for as long as possible, so when Zahra asks her why she has come to therapy, she gives her a long-winded answer that hints at some unresolved trauma she faced as a kid and adds details to help add meat to her story. She wishes she had pivotal news to declare, like the diagnosis of some terrible disease like cancer, or the death of someone close. Some theatrical event which she could recite while dabbing at her eyes, which would justify her state. She finally says that she doesn’t have a job and hasn't had a proper one for seven years.

‘I see.’

In the pause that follows, Eileen takes a sip of her tea and scans the room. She notices the succulent in a terracotta pot by the window. It looks out of place and unnecessary.

‘I have one just like that at home. Desert Diamond. It is a stabby little beast, but it has the prettiest leaves ever.’

This is a lie; Eileen hates plants. Her sister had one years ago, before it died when she watered it by holding it under running tap water. She realizes she is trying to make conversation, like they are old friends for a coffee meetup.  Zahra complies, and they chat a bit about plants, the acridity of the tea and the ongoing construction outside. And then, after a while, Zahra double clicks her pen, with the air of getting to business.

‘So, you’re unemployed. What does a typical day look like for you?’ She pulls out her prescription pad.

‘Normal, I guess.’  Repetitive would be a better adjective. The highlight of her week is filing for her unemployment benefits, where she invents some networking event and can claim she went to as a testament to her job searching efforts. She stopped caring about plausibility a long time ago, and now she carelessly fills in job roles each week like lawyer, lifeguard, furniture tester. When she first started filing for unemployment, it was a test of humility, to say the least. She felt like she might as well have gathered her sleeping bag and resigned herself to panhandling outside her building. Now, the humiliation has worn off, and she feels gleeful every time she receives the check in her mail, like she has discovered a shortcut to life no one else has. Once a year she took up an odd job as cashier at a game store or dental clinic or a telemarketer, just to keep her benefits going for the rest of the year. She never lasted longer than three months in each job. ‘Quick to learn but noncommittal’ is the common feedback from her employers before being let go. She can easily see her years dwindling in this manner, and Eileen fears she will die with her last memorable day being at a 7-Eleven bagging groceries.

‘I don’t get much done in a day,’ she says.

‘Most people don’t,’ Zahra replies. ‘You’d be surprised by how unproductive people are on a daily basis.’

‘I doubt anyone can top me in that regard.’ The only thing she accomplished yesterday was making a slightly burnt, too sugary coffee. She thought of a lot of things, though – eating healthier, cleaning out the white spots in her bathroom window (Reddit says they are galvanic corrosion), giving in and getting an electric toothbrush. Actually, doing those things? Nope. Somehow, they get lost in the translation from thought to execution.

‘You seem to harbor a lot of resentment to yourself.’

‘What gave it away?’

She meant it as an offhand comment, but Zahra frowns and jots down something on her prescription pad. Eileen would pay money to see what she has written about her but is also at the same time afraid of what she would discover. Probably not anything she doesn’t know of herself, but having others perceive it – or her being perceived at all – is a different level of scary.

‘Are you married?’

‘I was for a few years. He’s a very smart person.’ Somehow, this is the first thing that pops in her mind about him. She does recall the regular exchanges they had about taking out the trash, paying the monthly electricity bill, and, of course, the ever-present conundrum of what to have for dinner. Mundane, nothing groundbreaking. The most exciting thing she can recall right now is a trip to Japan they had been planning since forever but never made. It sounds sad, but it really isn’t. They spoke often of that trip to allude to a shared future, reassure each other, and then later on, to test the waters. It served as a mirage in their marriage.

But despite everything they shared, he was smart and a little selfish. During the fracturing of their marriage, he severed their assets with a precision that helped her forget all the tenderness they shared. In a way, it helped her get over him faster.

‘It was all a while ago,’ Eileen says.

Zahra murmurs an assent and flips through her file, her index finger catching on the page. Eileen realizes with a start that she has no eyelashes. If they are there, they are not visible. She reminds Eileen of her childhood doll after she had yanked out its lashes. She looks humanoid, with the blue veins beneath her translucent neck suggesting charged wires.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how easily would you trust someone?’ she asks, blinking her lashless eyes. Her eyebrows are flush, the only defining thing in her face. She wonders if the lash-lessness is genetic or by choice.

‘I don’t know. Six?’

And then: ‘Would you say you are smart?’

Eileen says no, half expecting them to fall into a poor re-enactment of the it’s-not-your-fault scene in Goodwill Hunting, with Zahra insisting that Eileen is smart in an increasingly intense fashion. Instead, she says, ‘Okay,’ almost punctuated with a shrug and scribbles something in her pad.

The rest of the session goes on with similar questions, some tickle her brain with its randomness, some that make her evasive. She lies at first, but soon learns that it doesn’t really matter, since it catches up with her in a neat circularity, like those exhaustive job applications that take your resume and then route back to asking the same questions. There is also something to be said about just how indulgent this whole thing is; since in no other setting do one's own feelings take center stage over objective truths. Eileen now understands why every person and their brother in New York City has a therapist. It is a luxury, like a massage at a spa or sinking into a sauna for a deep cleanse, but better, since it is of the mind.

Eileen’s sister, Alyssa, is smart – something you can’t say that about most people these days. Much smarter than Eileen. Alyssa knows about NFTs, inflation and why you can’t print money – the real answer, not just that you can’t because the government won’t allow it. Eileen likes to think that at birth they had both been assigned labels: Alyssa, the shrewd one, and Eileen, caged in the prison of her own mind. All they did was stick to them dutifully. Of course, being smart comes hand in hand with an instilled sense of superiority which might be why Eileen can hear Alyssa smack her lips slightly over the phone before saying, ‘I told Mom you are visiting the Dalai Lama.’

Eileen examines the bagel before her on the kitchen counter. A half-congealed egg yolk oozes out its sides and a long ropey bacon strip pokes out with its burnt ends. If Alyssa was in front of her, Eileen would strangle her with it. In her family, therapy, or anything related to feelings, is regarded with derision, but, then again, Eileen has long since crossed her familial thresholds of normalcy to care too much. She’s done her part in breaking generational standards. Still, the subtle taunt in Alyssa’s voice, even as she bulldozes on about how this might be a good thing and could fix her life, enrages her. When she hangs up, she frisbees the leftover bagel from the table into the sink, where the remaining egg thwacks against the counter wall. It looks like abstract art, next to the burgeoning spray of mold below the chimney. The last time her parents were over, the dead baby roaches under the table elicited such fresh dismay from her mom that you would think Eileen had propped up a carcass on the table. Now, she surveys the mess with some satisfaction, wishing her mom could see this.

When Eileen sits on the boule chair for her second therapy session later that day, she feels a bit like she is reclaiming her throne. Placed in front of her on the tasteful coffee table is a charcuterie board with cubed fruits, Potbelly Chocolate Chip Cookies and two mugs of hot apple cider. The room smells like how she imagines her late grandmother’s place would.

Eileen explains how she has lost touch with her friends. ‘Conversations mostly revolve around what we do during the day, our jobs. I once might’ve complained to my girlfriends about the co-worker who dilutes the coffee brew too much in the break room or my boss who wouldn’t approve my PTO. Since every day is Groundhog Day in my case, I ran out of things to say to them.’ Even though this question might embarrass her if asked in any other context, in this room she feels like she is imparting some sage wisdom, especially with Zahra hanging on to her every word.

When Zahra leaves to get some napkins, Eileen peers at the prescription pad. She can’t make much of the upside-down scrawl that seemed to be her diagnosis, but at the bottom of the page, she sees a fine spiral of doodles and a dramatic drawing of an eye. It makes her smile, taking her back to her middle-school days. She remembers doodling during classes, bored out of her mind and hoping that the girl next to her would comment on it and want to be her friend. That girl ended up hating Eileen, probably sniffing out her desperation for approval, and spent the rest of the year arranging her Herschel pencil case as a barricade between their desks.

After Zahra returns, Eileen picks up where she left off. When she mentions her family, Zahra asks, ‘What does your sister do?’

‘She works in corporate. She is in Human Resources.’ Eileen says the last two words like it’s a leech she wants to yank off her tongue.

‘What’s wrong with that?’

Everything. She had once sat through a session where her sister had laid off six people virtually, one after another. Her robotic monotone, indulgent sympathy and corporate niceties (her sister had the nerve to begin the call by saying nice to meet you!) had invoked in Eileen the urge to projectile vomit bile on her sister’s pressed slate-gray suit. Afterwards, her sister had driven to Dairy Queen to get a self-congratulatory Heath Bar Blizzard. Shamelessly, Eileen had taken up her offer of a banana split, because even back then she had been broke.

‘Nothing. Just a bit soulless, is all.’

Watching Zahra’s forehead knit in confusion, Eileen can see how she wouldn't understand. Her sister and she both share the same, infuriating composure and patience where they receive but give away nothing at all. Eileen knows therapists are required to put up this professional front to avoid getting too invested in their client’s lives, but still, it is disconcerting.

Eileen taps her nails against the delicate handle of her mug, suddenly squirmish.

She wonders if, just like her sister, Zahra also thinks she is lazy and entitled. The vain second born who expects the world to be within an arm’s reach for her scooping. ‘You wouldn’t flex a finger to push a button to save your own life,’ her sister once drawled, her mouth working gummily around a thick jelly donut, never bothering to close her mouth. Eileen had taken a mental snapshot of her sister, wanting to remember it in case she ever made the mistake of missing her. It was about a year after she had lost her job, and her sister had referred her internally to her company for a Senior Graphic Designer position Eileen knew she wasn’t qualified for. The job posting was nauseatingly half a mile long, inventing skill requirements as it progressed, and she passed up on it. Her sister held that over her head for two years, bruised that Eileen would dismiss her help in that way. According to her, Eileen deserves to wallow in the swamp she is currently in.

‘So, what job is respectable, or, in your words, not soulless?’

Eileen thinks about it. There are few jobs that she finds admirable. ‘Firemen. Dog walkers. Kindergarten teachers. Doctors.’ She knows healthcare is the second largest money-making scheme in the U.S., and no job completely escapes the muck of capitalism, but at least they sound halfway noble on paper.

Zahra uncrosses her ankles and leans forward to study her; Eileen feels like a test rat in a lab. She raises her palms. ‘Look, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know every job needs to be done and someone has to do it, be it a criminal defense attorney, an executioner or a HR manager.’ Laughter bubbles in her throat as she realizes the bracket she has placed her sister’s profession in. ‘But it’s also true that you have to be of a certain disposition to carry out those jobs, and those are not necessarily people I trust.’

Until about a decade ago, Eileen had a very strong notion of an idyllic society and its functioning. When someone paid her attention for more than ten minutes, she would go on a diatribe, unprompted, saying things like, ‘I don’t think people are meant to work 9 to 5. Human beings are designed to bake blueberry scones, travel the world, and own horse farms.’ Now, she knows better than to say that out loud, even though she still believes it.

When her session is over and she gets up to leave, Eileen looks down at the table that now resembles a picnic spread. Unprompted, she feels a tidal wave of nostalgia, the way you do when looking at pictures of red-and-white checkered tablecloth or DVD players. She is seized by the urge to invite Zahra to brunch, just to return the favor. She wants to thank her over a tray of apple spread, tea sandwiches and quiches. Thank her, thank her for her service like for military veterans. Outside, the receptionist smiles at her with a frown.

On her birthday, Eileen receives a package with a short, unsigned note: ‘Call Mom.’ The C is curled with a swoop, making it look like a salutation in a greeting card. She ignores it and rips open the parcel to find a rectangular board game called Machi Koro, which sounds more like a Japanese snack. The gift feels like a cruel prank by Alyssa, since the label says two to four people and she knows Eileen has zero. Or maybe, just like every one of her Christmas presents to Eileen, she has gotten it so that she can play when she comes over. Her sister reserves a manic zeal for board games, morphing into a monster when anyone breaks a rule and taunting whoever she beats. She suspects her sister echoes the same zest in her own life, cutting off anyone who dared to underperform at the ‘game.’ The cover of the board displays a family wall wearing euphoric smiles gathered around the board game and it makes Eileen laugh. Any game involving dice in her family is a bloodbath.

She tosses the game into her closet and picks out a rag riddled with holes. Scrubs the pink mold in her shower, and then the black mold in her kitchen. Her fingers keep slipping into the cracks between the tiles, nubbing her nails. She feels wistful when she’s done; her kitchen wall now looks like it’s been stripped of some wallpaper, plain and boring. She then vacuums her house, the dead roaches and dust bunnies disappearing into the vacuum with a satisfying crackle. Mops the non-carpeted parts, taking pleasure in her floors marinating in lemony detergent. She wishes she could do the same to her brain and pull out all the errant particles with tweezers. Once, she read that the human brain is filled with magnetic clumps caused by air pollution. She imagines wearing a giant magnet around her ears like headphones and short circuiting her brain into functioning normally.

‘I’m going to fix my mind,’ she tells herself as she wanders the grocery store for something organic. At home, she makes spinach and feta quiche and eats it on the couch, stretched out luxuriously. There is a mildly interesting home makeover show on TV. The host is gaslighting the owners into liking the hideous renovation, talking over them and gesturing wildly with game show hands. There’s something performative and disingenuous about the host’s behavior that makes the show entertaining to watch. When she’s done with the quiche, she soaks the pots and plates in the sink with hot water and returns to her living room, which spreads out vastly before her. It looks like it housed ten guests who have just vacated. She ignores the bubble of emptiness that expands in her sternum, like water when you drink too much, too fast. If only she could alchemize all this oceanic loneliness into something productive. She is young and healthy. There must be something she can do with that, with her life. Not today, she thinks, when she finds eyes growing hot with tears. Quickly, she slips outside. Walks the path that circles the park a few times and tries to untether herself from her mind like a kite. She watches the children in the playground, watches the dogs strutting by, and the slow descent of the sun. She wishes she were the type of person who enjoys sunsets and finds profound meaning in them. She never understood them. To her, a sunset is just a sunset. She sits on a park bench until the last of the orange dips into the horizon and then walks home.

Two weeks later, her sister encroaches on her living space with no preamble whatsoever. ‘You could bury a body with all the snow you are hoarding on your doorstep,’ she says, taking off her windbreaker and Vans. She wrestles with her two pashmina scarves, comically strangling herself in the process. Underneath, her cheeks are shiny and the tip of her nose rosy from the cold. Her face looks wiped clean, almost glowing, like a baby’s. Eileen’s own face is powdery. It’s been weeks since she washed her face, or any other part of her body. She seems to have acquired a cat-like aversion to baths. Alyssa takes a measured breath as she moves closer, like one would when in proximity to an animal in a zoo enclosure.

‘Did you just wake up?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘You have goo in your eyes.’ Eileen does not answer, hating her for policing her schedule, habits, anything. She tucks her blanket under her feet, so the draft from the door Alyssa so considerably left open does not get to her. A low-thrumming ache spreads behind her eyes; she wants to curl up and nap. Sleep in the morning is usually light and dreamless.

‘Finished your session?’ Alyssa asks.

‘Nope.’ Her lips pop on the ‘p’. ‘But you’ll be happy to hear that the Dalai Lama is no longer seeing me.’

Eileen checks her emails. Other than the six cancellation emails, her inbox is mostly spam Black Friday offers from H&M, UberEats coupons and Indeed jobs. It’s truly amazing how empty her schedule is now with this therapy thing gone. She can bring a sleeping bag and camp out in the Appalachians if she wants. Try her hand at cross-country hiking. This is what she remembers thinking last week as Zahra explained to her with infinite patience that, for some reason, her health insurance no longer covered her practice. She had to repeat herself three times, since Eileen was busy wondering if a bear might take pity and eat her in the woods. She once read that there is, on average, one murder every four years on the Appalachian trail, and since she has no gun, she is a casualty waiting to happen.

She also remembers thinking another thing. A memory tinted gray like an old film.  Despite all the tales she regaled of her imagined childhood trauma to Zahra, there had been none but one that was true. In her formative years, she remembers a girl much older than her coming over to her house, all flip-flops and dishwater blonde hair. She doesn’t remember the girl’s face but remembers her own bubblegum breath as she read Charlotte’s Web, eager to switch voices for the different animals in the farm. Showed the tall pretty girl her crayon collection. When her parents explained a few weeks later that her babysitter had quit, she was too sad to cry. She only cried when she wanted to be pitied. Later, she was disgusted for daring to hope to be friends when even kids her age wanted little to do with her, her self-repulsion ballooning out of her body as she lay in bed that night. In the following years, it would fester and mature faster than her small body.

Now, she long since learnt to brace herself to avoid being blindsided. In fact, she has done so much physical bracing she is pretty sure she has abs layered across her belly, underneath all the blubber from bracing and sucking in her stomach during pictures. She can take a swinging blow to her midsection no problem.

‘Who cares,’ she says as she eats a pita chip from last night’s takeaway. Its saltiness erases some of the sourness on her breath. ‘Nothing ever works out for me anyway.’

‘You’re right. Somehow, nothing ever works out for you,’ her sister repeats, deadpan. She walks over to the fridge to snoop. ‘The rest of us are all charmed. You are the unlucky one. Poor little Ellie, the whole world’s conspiring against her.’ The sound of her childhood nickname laced with contempt is jarring. She doesn’t need this, Eileen thinks. She can do without her sister’s scathing commentary this early in the morning – well, afternoon.

‘What do you want?’

‘Why do you have literal organs in your fridge?’ Alyssa turns and holds out a jar of white sludge floating in murky liquid.

‘It’s mushroom kombucha. Got it at the deli last week,’ Eileen says. For a hot moment, she thought the mold had colonized her fridge too – it looks slimy. Which makes sense because it is healthy, and healthy things are never supposed to look or taste good. The kombucha looks downright disgusting, so it better fix her entire body, sleep schedule included.

‘You don’t have eggs or milk, but you have two gallons of fermented tea.’

After a moment, Alyssa returns with a tall glass of kombucha and plants herself on the couch. She pinches a camisole in a heap of clothes piled next to her and wrinkles her nose.

‘Those are washed,’ Eileen says quickly. It’s funny how she claims she doesn’t care about what her sister thinks of her but rushes to defend herself against a micro expression of disgust. Alyssa takes an underwear from the pile and folds it into a tiny square, pressing the edges like their mom does. Eileen wishes her sister would just spit it out.

‘I drove up to see Mom last week. She uses Google Maps to get to the bodega at the end of the block. Her neighbor told me she knocked on their door twice last month, mistaking it as her place.’

‘Despite their Christmas wreath?’ Mom’s neighbor has their Christmas wreath framing their peephole all 365 days of the year. They are immigrants from Taiwan who moved in a few years ago; the only holiday they celebrate is the Chinese New Year.

‘Yep. She seems merry and keeps downplaying it, but I’m worried about her. I think she’s really lonely. When I was there, she spoke to the bank for half an hour for just a cash withdrawal. Also… She has these awful tear stain scars under her eyes, like little streaks of discoloration, which she patches up with a heap of moisturizer every morning. Only her face gets dry and cakey by midday, so they appear very obvious. It really scared me.’

Tear stain scars sound like something completely made up. Her sister can really lay it on if she wants to. But it has the intended effect. The apparition-like woman in the bus with the apple and the terrible tear troughs appears in Eileen’s mind. She pinches herself internally. Their mom was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s three months ago, and Eileen has not called home as often as she should. She wants to protest to Alyssa that she was just thinking about Mom, but that would sound threadbare. The truth is she hadn’t. It feels like pressing into a bruise every time she thinks of her mom’s illness, so she has banished it from her mind entirely.

‘Her doctor discussed assisted living facilities but, of course, Mom wouldn’t like that and also it’d be out of pocket.’

‘Wait.’ Eileen sits up on the couch and lets the chip crumbs fall into the folds of her blanket. ‘Doesn’t Mom’s healthcare cover this?’

‘Mom’s healthcare doesn’t cover shit. I suggested getting disability since she’s retired anyway, and then switching to Medicare, but that would take at least two years of collecting SSDI. Obviously, she can’t wait that long.’

There is an expression of concealed delight on her sister’s face as she says all this, because she knows most of this is going right over Eileen’s head.

‘What about Medicaid?’

‘That’s for people sixty-five and older. Don’t go suggesting Obamacare next.’

 ‘So, what’s the solution?’ Eileen wants to ask, but the answer has been creeping up on her since she first brought it up. It’s the reason her sister’s tone is hyper even and her eyes watchful, as she sets her mug on a makeshift coaster on the coffee table. Alyssa never cares about stuff like that in her own home, much less in someone else’s.

‘Are you suggesting that she move in with us?’ The choice of pronoun is simply to forestall. Whatever it is her sister is alluding to, she will be the one to voice it.

Alyssa keeps her eyes trained on the crack in the couch wedged with a fine collection of crumbs as she says the next bit. ‘Amelia will be moving out for college in two years, but until then, we just don’t have the room. And you know Jake. He’s inept as ever and expects everything to be catered to him, from the jelly for his morning toast to fishing out matching socks from the laundry. The boy can’t even use a toaster. I will have my hands full with the two of them until at least next year – that’s not fair to Mom.’

Eileen is scared she will yawn during this inventory of her sister’s home dynamics. She searches for something in her own life to leverage against all this but comes up empty. She has nothing, and is so, so tired.

Her sister eyes her. ‘You might be wondering what my contribution will be, if you accommodate Mom. I will pay you a hefty monthly allowance. To cover expenses and stuff.’ Eileen refrains from asking how much.

The hot water chafes her skin and stings her eyes. She feels like her skin is shedding and woozy. Eileen once read that hot showers widen blood vessels making you prone to fainting. She traces the clump of hair plastered on the linoleum wall and wonders if her sister has left. If she hasn’t, Eileen will agree to the proposed deal. Maybe make her sign a contract and laminate it since Alyssa likes things done professionally. Then Eileen might deliver an impassioned speech about how, if they don’t take care of their mother, who will? Her sister will nod, maybe with some wetness in her eyes, not because she is moved by Eileen’s kindness, but because she is secretly relieved.

She cannot believe her bargaining chip has worked. Eileen scoffs, running the soap under the water. Her sister likes to pretend they are very different, but they are both cut out from the same cloth. If Eileen is selfish, her sister is not a thread behind her.

When she gets out of the shower half an hour later, she feels light enough she could float. She chooses a fluffy multi-colored robe from her closet. It feels like feathers against her skin. ‘I look like an exotic bird,’ she says to the mirror and flaps her arms, keeping her eyes on the ballooned arms of her robe. She is afraid that if she meets her eyes she would burst out in hysterical laughter.

In the living room, her sister has the news on, something about a protest for farmers, with her eyes trained on her phone. She is aggressively texting someone, and the pings of messages come out in one continuous vibrato. Eileen microwaves some popcorn, humming, and resolves to clean out her fridge and fill it with fresh groceries. Perhaps that cheese wheel that she always sees near the front counter of the bodega. Or that packet of assorted macarons she eyes every time she goes in. She sets up the game Alyssa got for her birthday and lights a candle. Maybe she will be okay with her sister winning this round. She might even let her.