Part 3.2

Eleanor spent the morning in the kitchen. She put the dishes in the washer, wiped off the table, scrubbed the stovetop. At one point, she looked at the clock and realized she’d been moving a sponge in a circular motion over the same spot on the counter for the last twenty minutes. She swept the floor and then mopped it. Eleanor groaned as she dumped the mop water into the sink while Fox ran across the pristine tile leaving tiny three-toed footprints.

Harvest looked up from his work at coaxing a line of sugar ants through a crack in the window pane. “It will never be clean you know,” he said. “You can sweep and mop and scrub and disinfect. You can do your best, but it will never be enough.

Eleanor felt weary as she looked into his eyes. She sat on the floor and rubbed at one of the footprints with a half-hearted index finger.

“What’s the point?” said Harvest. Eleanor laughed, for she had simultaneously asked herself the same question.

She pulled her legs up, wrapped her arms around them and lowered her forehead to rest on her knees. “There is no point,” she murmured to the darkness before her eyes.

“You’re right,” said Harvest. “Why don’t you just stop?”

“I am tired,” she confessed.

“Of course you are,” his voice was kind, suddenly next to her. “You didn’t sleep last night. Why don’t you take a nap?”

Her eyes were already heavy as she lifted her head to look at him. “A nap?” she whispered. What was that?

“Here,” he held out one long-fingered hand. “You can go into your room and lay down. I’ll help you.”

As she blanched at the proffered assistance and he let the hand drop, his eyes were a little more yellow than before. She pushed herself from the floor. Her feet dragged out of the kitchen and through the living room. Aren't I already dreaming? The objects in her periphery had begun to ripple, as if she were underwater. The twins swam across her vision, moving in slow-motion. She could hear Baz and Pitchtongue talking in muted tones very far away. But if I was underwater, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, right? With that thought, she found herself unable to catch her breath. She stumbled through her bedroom door, her hands reaching out for something solid to right herself. She turned to look at Harvest’s wavy outline and felt herself sinking. He said something in that calm voice that infuriated her.

“I can’t hear you,” she wanted to say. But all that emerged was an, “Ah-.” When you can’t breathe, you can’t speak.

Is it getting darker? She was dizzy, being pulled into an ever narrowing spiral. Surely she was drowning. Surely in the next moment she would be swallowed by cool, black oblivion. Then she could rest. She really was very tired….