The sponge drags dying foam in figures of eight across the counter, a squeaky clean alibi for evading sleep. He went to bed seventeen minutes ago. In nine minutes his breathing will be shallow, but loud. Predictable, but unsettling. In nineteen minutes, she will trace the familiar edges of the staircase. The creaking has caught her out once before, he ended up falling asleep on her side of the bed seven minutes after she closed the bedroom door. 

The red numbers on the microwave dare her to follow the sickly scent of him. She twists the metal that hangs loosely above her knuckle, the skin beneath infinitely red. Sometimes, when he leaves, she thinks about taking it off, maybe resting her wrist on the windowsill, bathing the patch in sunlight. But, somehow, he will know. Or if he accuses her of it she can’t lie. Her poker face died with the girl she once was. The ray of sunshine that bounced through school corridors, she customised clothes in careless acrylic accidents, and rosey cheeks dusted with flour on eve’s of a loved one’s birthday. 

An oven door has become a witness. It reflects the scene’s back to her, which she has become grateful for. Sometimes daylight catches the cold crystal of vases before it’s nothing more than a minefield of fragments on the kitchen tiles. When a brief rainbow washes the reflection she knows she's not making it up. When a tree falls and nobody hears it, did it ever really fall? 

She falls asleep in forty-seven minutes. Sleep clung to her somewhere between moving to Austin or ending it all.