I took my meal near the window. The glass was replaced by a membrane of plastic that alerted me to every mention of my name. I locked both doors in my kick drum house from the inside, something I hadn’t done since nineteen ninety-five. It went like this:

Mund: Can you tell her to stop?

Cue: Sure, but it’s not a guarantee.

Mund: We got young kids right next door fer chrissakes.

Cue: Can you take your hand away from your face when you talk to me?

Mund: Sure.

Cue: That’s better.

But the sun stayed up all day. And if it were darker outside I might have felt less guilty. And the sun stayed up for more than a day (same shadows, same length) and I ate very slowly to crush all the germs.

Mund: Please hug me.

Cue: Finish chewing first.

When I was ten I wasted a whole ten-dollar bill on a jet-ski arcade game. I was expecting forty quarters back, and I pushed the coin return for five minutes looking at my brothers’ disappointed faces while they pointed to a machine that read “tokens.” And I knew what my dad was doing to that lady from the church. I played Wave Race Extreme dispassionately for twenty minutes to teach my brothers something about reconciliation.

Mund: I’m going to kill your mom.

Cue: I know.