Listening to the empty house, hearing the old voices upstairs and her mother calling them to dinner, their feet booming on the stairs, the fire in the stove ticking as though it spoke to time like some deranged clock, as though the log in the stove were spitting out the time stored in its wood, thinking, time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left, the slow sleeping breath before her. It is the body that breathes the mind, this is what she thinks, it is the heart that beats the man until the man is beaten and she finds herself
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