He cries when he cuts his finger on a catfood can. He don’t know nothing about crying. He should just shut up.

One thing ten miles that way. Something else two miles that way. Airplane over head, a mile up, little silver dot. Last time this house was painted three, four years. Longer than that. Lean up against it and it comes off on your coat. It needed paint when the first kid was born.

This salad bowl is all scratched up. The gladiolas all went the same color. That plum tree looks like the frost got it. Girl comes in and says, swing broke mom.

The dog got scared and pooped under the bed and it hardened there cause the room was hot and had a good breeze. She moved the bed and cut it out of the carpet with sewing scissors and scrubbed with a whole can of shampoo but still thinks about it down there, under the bed.

Oh he has such a headache from all the paint fumes at work. He should just shut up. He don’t know nothing about nothing.

Paint fumes.

She acts motherly in front of the school when he misses the school bus and she has to drive him and accidentally slams his fingers in the door and he cries, “sorry baby, we gotta be careful, real sorry about that. Here let mama kiss it.” But he jerks his hand away and runs off to his first-grade friends, ignoring her. And she thinks, you don’t know nothing about it. Just shut up. She tried it out when she got home and shut her own hand in the door. She held it about where his had been. It hurt a little, but he was crying more from the shock of it, from the surprise of his own mom hurting him, even accidentally, than from the actual pain. She pinched her fingers in the drawer. She pinched them with the pliers: nowhere even close.

He comes home from work with another headache, oh my head. It starts getting dark she turns on the lights. The TV blares some kid show and she puts his dinner on the table and he doesn’t ask about the bandaid on her finger, doesn’t say anything. Catfood lid doesn’t hurt hardly at all. You just keep quiet like that. Just shut up. That’s right. If I want your opinion, you go have a baby first. Now that hurts. Nothing else, she’s not interested in nothing else. Nothing else comes close. Just shut up.