at Vesuvius. The David Hockney calendar. With her scissors, she clipped it into small pieces that fluttered into the garbage. Next, the New York Times article about her award. She folded it on itself before she cut, like making tiny snowflakes. Then the picture of her and Saraub at the Long Beach Boardwalk. After the hot-dog lady snapped the photo, he’d hoisted Audrey over his shoulder and charged toward the ocean as if to throw her in. She lifted her pen, and line by line, crossed out his face. Then her face, too. Then kept going until the gloss was gone, and the black seeped through the paper, an indelible stain.
Her phone rang. Somebody from the 59th Street team, no doubt. Just like Betty had done, they were using her dry. Also like Betty, they wanted more. She imagined grabbing her scissors and snipping the arteries along their necks. Watching the blood gush, the surprise on their entitled faces. She’d get Randolph and Mortimer, too. Slice them up into little pieces, until they were a heaping carnage collecting flies on the office floor. Paint the walls of this entire building red. Then surprise fickle Saraub at his apartment. He’d betrayed her, and now she would separate her love from bone.
The phone kept ringing. She picked it up. Jill’s voice. “Audrey. Could you come by my office?”
Jill, with her phony concern, and her bullshit about not making partner because she was a woman. Maybe she just couldn’t hack it.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Yeah,” Audrey said, then hung up and stood.
Fuck Vesuvius. Fuck the rooftop memorial. Fuck the buildings, and cemeteries, and the plaques, and the lilies and cloying baby’s breath flowers that piled sky-high, and the mourners who exaggerated their grief because they needed to feel alive. Fuck the widows and their whining and the kids without parents, like the dead hadn’t always outnumbered the living. Fuck the holes all over this city, and in her life, too.
She marched, limbs like lead. Her thoughts were all regrets that moved too slowly to register. Valium clotted them like tiny strokes in her brain, so they sparked and died without reaching conclusion: Jayne’s hula girl, her clothes, her mother right now, breathing even though she didn’t want to, and most of all, 14B. It was doing this to her. It had to be.
Those rational thoughts died as the thing in her stomach suckled and grew. She pictured Jill. Arched brows and stink breath—drink a glass of water, lady! Imagined tearing her limbs away from her trunk, one by one, then setting what remained on fire. She bristled at the grotesquerie of such a notion, then reassured herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t alone. Surely The Breviary would understand.
Audrey stopped at Jill’s office. She squeezed her hands into fists and pounded the door open. The office was expansive. Ten times the size of Audrey’s cube. At first she didn’t notice Jill standing at the window. All she saw was the view; Ellis Island lit up against Hurricane Erebus, and little matchbox cars on either side of Manhattan’s veinlike highways. She imagined lightning striking the highest point, and setting the whole city on fire. Watching it come crashing down. The dust would be a nuclear winter.
There were tears in her eyes. She felt their coldness on her cheeks. These things she was thinking, she hated them.
“I need to talk to you, Jill,” she said. Her voice was a few decibels louder than normal conversation, but Jill didn’t turn, or even jolt in surprise. Her nose was pressed up against the glass window while down below, rough waves etched white scars in the water.
She hovered in her boss’ doorway, like she’d hovered so many times before, too frightened to speak or call attention to herself, just hoping that after a while, Jill would notice her. She lifted her index fingers beneath Clara’s glasses to wipe the tears away, then wondered: whose sweat suit am I wearing?
She noticed for the first time that she was holding a pair of scissors. Their sharp twin blades, intended for thick construction paper, were about five inches long. She didn’t remember having carried them from her desk, but here they were in her shaking hands, their points exposed as if ready to stab. She dropped them as she stepped inside Jill’s office.
“I quit,” she said the same moment that the phone rang and drowned out her words. Jill jumped, but she didn’t answer it or even turn away from