She wrote a hymn to the God of Tuesdays: a small, sad deity with the face of a

bloodhound, stuck between the anger and despair of Monday and its bared teeth, and the
two-faced Janus that was Wednesday. Pouring out of her the words came, squid black ink
on her white computer screen, saying Neither of beginning nor end, O Thou Tuesday, O
Thou Tuesday, enable Thou me to be solid and content, fix me to this path, O Thou
Tuesday, O Thou Tuesday, over and over, one hundred copy-pasted times. A Microsoft
prayer wheel, rotating with her hard-drive.
Alice never slept well. Lying down, yawning something chronic as she set her alarm and
laid it on the bedside table, thoughts would rise up in her, rushing like water, and she
knew that there was nothing for it, that she could lie there for a thousand nights, but she
would never sleep or dream.
John, she said to him one night. John, dyou think Im going mad?
No, mate, he said, gentle. He always called her mate, the blokey familiarity jarring
pleasurably when he would kiss her and nuzzle her neck. Little sparks down her back.
No. Youre not. You just need a good nights sleep. Its insomnia. I read this article on
it and on and on, words begetting words. And at night there was nothing to be done
but go down to the computer, flip the screen up and load the word processor. Click the
keys into the night, vowel and consonant, over again, repetitions long into the dawn.
***
The palm reader by the station told her, for the price of exactly ten cups of coffee at the
hipster caf down the road, that there was an excess of something in her, that her life line
skirted dangerously close to the mount of Jupiter, and that without an outlet, the
something would rise up inside of her body like steam in a pot, and eventually she would
boil over.
Something to be avoided, the palm reader said, before hawking and spitting onto the
road beside her.
I guess, Alice said, wrinkling her nose. I half-believe the old fraudster, she thought.
No guesses, the woman said. None at all. She looked at her. Deadly serious. She
winked.
Alice rolled her eyes. She hadnt really thought it would work, that this would tell her
anything, had she? She paid the money and left, swinging her umbrella on her arm. Side
to side, side to side.
***
Sunday evening found her writing poetry to radiation: the steady metal glow of uranium
and plutonium and radium, a eulogy to Madame Curie. Bright and shining, and you saw

what none could see, and walked with it, even in your pocket. Your child, Pierres and
yours, dark bright metal. Its not like she knows where they come from. She failed Alevel chemistry. The look of disappointment on her fathers face.
When John came downstairs in his boxers, blinking in the early morning light, she was
standing in the kitchen; microwaving croissants while the coffee percolated, hissing and
spitting, throwing noises and smells all over the house.
Huh, he said, his voice scratchy. All brambles and wiry hair, he was.
What? she said. She knows what. Searched in the fridge for the jam. Strawberry,
blueberry. It happened again. I did it again.
Oh, he said. Articulate as ever. She rolled her eyes, quietly.
I dont know, she said. There was a lump in her throat. She poured John his coffee, and
he kissed her on the forehead. Steady. She reached out, running a hand through his chest
hair, dipping her head to smell his neck. Sweaty and bed-rumpled. I dont know, she
said again. He was getting hard but Alice felt tired, all of a sudden. I should finish the last
few verses, she thought. The sun was getting in her eyes. There was a loose thread on
Johns crotch. There was a lump in her throat. There was a lump in his crotch. There was
a loose thread in her throat. The sun was getting in his eyes.
***
Alice read Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse in the autumn garden, bathing in the
phrases while her tea cooled on the patio by her feet. In the midterm, dusty tumbledown
of an argument over something petty the month before, John had called her affected for
reading it. She had fumed and called him a philistine. She had thrown his copy of a Dan
Brown novel at him, and stormed out into the late summer air and the quiet of the world.
And when she came to the river, she had put stones in her trouser pockets, even though it
had been a grey-dry summer, and the river was really no more than a trickle of two
handspans; a wet afterthought, and she had no intention of drowning herself anyway.
She turned the pages, feeling the words pull at her. Moons and tides. It would be easy to
step in, to drown in them.
But she was mixing her metaphors.
She put the book down; she went back inside and made soup, finished the translation of a
patent, two days behind schedule while the vegetables sweated in the oil. She added stock
and stirred, her long wooden spoon making figures-of-eight in the saucepan, bumping
against the leeks. There was a comfort in the smell of carrots. Waxy potatoes waned.
Softened. Maybe she would add a little cumin.