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Tempers calmed down and I kind of started remembering that I did, to some extent, care about him. I started remembering why I was still there. Then I recalled how he’d pulled a fast one on me at Piranha, about three years before, over a beer with the whole gang. Hardly ten minutes passed after everyone had gathered when he said to me: “Shut up, dude, let Cătălin have a go! You look good when you listen.”

I kept quiet then, but now I had to strike back, I didn’t want to put up with it any longer. When I entered the room, I glimpsed, for a few seconds, the frame of a porn movie reflected in the window, where a guy shoved his arm into a girl’s ass up to the elbow.

“Are you so tense that you had to jerk off?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aren’t you ashamed to watch women getting fucked in the ass while I cook, wash the dishes, mop the floor? All you’ve got left to do is watch rapes live and that’s about it.”

“Aren’t you done annoying me today? I’m not watching anything.”

“Yeah, right, I saw you watching it, you turned your phone off when I came in.”

“How did you see anything if I turned it off?”

“Look, I know what I saw.”

“Fuck’s sake, you’re nuts. I wasn’t watching anybody get fucked in the ass. And fuck off, you’re always busting my balls.”

It didn’t take long for me to lose my wits. Not because he was watching those whores or because he wanted to jack off. I just couldn’t stand him making a fool of me anymore. After the tenth “Leave me alone, can’t you hear, you saw nothing,” I picked up a plate from the countertop and smashed it against the wall. Right behind him. Shards fell onto the couch, a few on top of him. When he noticed where the plate came from – the set his mother had brought as a housewarming gift when we first moved into the studio – he turned white.

“I swear on mom’s life, I’ll knock your lights out!”

He took a few steps towards me and I headed down the hallway, where I had laundry out to dry. He knocked over the dryer, the panties scattered everywhere, a pair of jeans I’d bought from IDM for his birthday fell on my head.

“Go fuck yourself!” I yelled.

He grabbed me by the neck and threw me down. He seemed taller than ever, towering above me. Foaming at the mouth. After he grabbed me by the collar and pummeled me into the floor a few more times, he put on his sneakers and spat – symbolically – at my feet. Then he slammed the door and left. I sat up, leaning against the wall scratched by the dryer. Japonica had come out from under the sofa and nested on some panties piled up by the wall.

I needed to sleep – out of necessity, not pretense – but I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep. For the past year, I’d been getting no more than four hours a night. I had learned to walk, to behave, to be, without making waves. I knew how to respond nicely to concerns about the dark circles under my eyes: “Yes, I’m fine, I sleep, sometimes even eat, this is just a phase; of course, I know that light follows darkness, that we live as we choose to live.”

It didn’t bother me so much that I couldn’t sleep, but that I dreamed in the meager time spent asleep. Nights with devils, with monsters, with the dead, impossible loves, the end of the world, bloody nights, my mother’s abortions. Nights that do not forget. Everything I fearfully swept under the rug in daytime would come out at night, just like those ferrets who carried off the chicks grandma had raised with love and aspirin. Of all the dreams I had, there was one that haunted me for a decade, always vivid and incomprehensible.

I walk barefoot down the main street of my grandparents’ village. I know every stone, since I come here every summer. I have a white silk dress on and fuzz on my feet, because I haven’t touched the razor in a while. I go to the well to draw water. Dirt under my nails and rough heels, full of grubs and soil. I’m hot, the sun burns so hard that it melts the corners of the overexposed image into white, like in an expired film reel. I jump over the cement ditch and turn left, towards the churchyard. It’s always shady here, the kind of shade that chills me to the bone, no matter how hot it is outside. I’m not looking for anyone, I don’t meet anyone either. I find a well in the graveyard, where every year, grandma and I planted tulips and roses for jam. I draw water, but can’t find our flowers – I know they’d taken hold, but now they’re gone. I step on two mounds of earth with makeshift crosses: two branches tied with string. They look like the graves we used to dig for dead sparrows behind our apartment block. Except these aren’t sparrows, but children. No names on the graves, but a thought seizes me like a cold that won’t go away: I know these are my mother’s kids. I hurry back home, to our yard where it’s warm and cozy. I zigzag towards my mother, knock over the bucket of water trying to lift it onto the bench. In our yard, a headless chicken zigzags as well, spraying the nightshade bushes with blood. I sprint to the summer kitchen, slam the door against the wall. My mother sits by the stove, on a chair pressed against the headboard. She wears a red woolen vest, even though it’s summer. Her right hand covers her belly. A red thread of blood drips down her leg, flows down the leg of the chair. I scream at the top of my lungs, about to lose my voice: “Why do you sit there, do something, please! Can’t you see the blood pouring out of you?” “It’s all right, it’ll pass now,” she says, closing her eyes and stretching out.

This was the kind of dream that kept me glued to my mattress. I’d lie there, in the dark, with my eyes wide open and my arms crossed over my chest, until I tunnelled through the night and saw the light again, which meant I was allowed to move and be awake. I remembered it all:

me at 9 years old, perched on top of the bed, whispering the Lord’s Prayer, knees drawn to my chest, covered by a sheet;

me at 12 years old, still covered by the sheet, practicing kissing with my tongue into my cupped hand;

me at 20, going out for a Coke only at night, because my face was covered with wounds from the pimples I picked under the covers when I couldn’t sleep;

me at 27, in a hallway enlivened only by the ticking of the clock. And my mother, in the other room, slumped in her armchair, her feet in a basin of warm water, salt, and a sliver of soap, ready to trim her cuticles while doing the crossword, pausing every now and then to chew on the pencil for that five-letter word she hadn’t used in a while. It’s always Sunday morning, when the whole neighborhood is frozen, the radio is buzzing and it smells of coffee;

but it wasn’t 1999. It was 2019. My mother no longer trimmed her cuticles on the balcony. No one listened to Radio Romania’s Current Affairs. No one ate donuts anymore, good news was boring. It was summer and my nose ran like a faucet, with thick snot sliding down my throat and into my chest. I snorted instead of breathing: I was trapped inside myself.

I couldn’t remember the last time my mother let me have it. Would she be upset if I told her that I was a big girl, that someone else knocked me around now? Would she think I deserved it? Or would she just repeat what she’d told me after she first saw him at dinner?

“I told you that Dan is an animal. A wild animal – and he should stay in the woods, with the other animals.”