1. This Good Wife

     A handful of broken glass litters your windowsill, but the window itself is intact, and it's the only window in your small studio. With a slow hand, you sweep the pieces into a paper bag. You find a lady bug of blood in the heel of your palm, and it makes you remember playing chess with your ex-wife, how she used to clear the board with one wave of her arm. Afterwards, you'd silently watch as she lit a cigarette and bled smoke out of her mouth in the cold park air.

     Tonight, as you drift on the edge of sleep, you hear faint sounds coming from the bathroom. You forget you live alone, and slide back against the wall to make room for some imaginary lover who will not come thudding tiredly out of the bathroom to lie next to you with rotting breath or smoky hair tickling your nose.

2. This Little Well

     The next day you find more broken glass on the windowsill, and few pieces on your blanket. You check the window again. It's still there. You exhale against it, fogging the surface.

     After cleaning up the glass, you go to take a shower, but find a dead bird in the bathtub, resting perfectly on top of a dark stain that's always been there. You wonder if the bird and the glass are connected, but see that the bird's been dead for a long time. Stiff, black feathers protrude from a desiccated, eyeless body. Even so, you check the window again, open and close it, and snap the levers into place. You want to take a shower, but you can't touch the bird—can't stand the way the dark, empty eye socket stares at you. You shut the door to the bathroom and open your mouth to say something about the bird, but you live alone.

     You remember coming out of the bathroom once, after a fight with your wife, and finding her lying half-in and half-out of the closet where she'd collapsed from the exertion of screaming.

3. This Little Smell

     When you wake the next day, you find more glass, more on the blanket. You have to move carefully to clean the glass away from your seamless, solid window which you're sure must be connected to the bird in the bathtub that you still can't go near; it's even larger today, with a horrible, sunken filmy eye staring. You close your eyes and press your fists against your temples, screaming inside to just pick up the bird already, just pick it up. But you can't make yourself do it. Your hands freeze and hover at the edge of the tub and you remember your wife grabbing the wheel of the car from the passenger seat and dragging you both off the road. You kicked her out of the car—no, that was another time. You both just sat there breathing hard, feeling the rush of speed even though the car was stopped. You try not to think about what would have happened if you hadn't hit the brakes in time, if you'd hit that wall of rock instead. She dribbled tears and snot onto your shoulder as she begged you for forgiveness—no, that was another time as well.

     This day is too long for you, so you try to read but you can't ignore the smell of the place, or the smell of yourself.

4. This New Lock

     There's so much glass over you that you're afraid to move. Your hand creeps out from under the blanket and pulls the curtain aside to see your only window, still perfect.

     You pay $95 to change the lock on your door. The man notes a smell and you try not to smile when you tell him there's a dead bird in your bathtub.

     He leaves, and now you're determined to get the bird out. With a towel in one hand, and a garbage bag in the other, you thrust yourself into the bathroom. But you can't stand the way the little black nugget of an eye stares at you, or the club-armed way the feathers splay out. So you drop the towel on the kitchen floor and wash yourself with napkins and green dish soap. Then you piss in the sink.

     After you move your bed away from the window, you stand there and stare at the courtyard below, where a couple sits on a bench, one reading to the other. You remember when your wife dropped a microwave from a second story window while you walked beneath it—that big crash from behind. You tried not to giggle.

     Tonight you crawl toward sleep, and even though you remain as still as possible, it feels like you're moving. It's the feeling you get when you run in the morning, when you run until you strain the leash of exhaustion and snap to halt with your hands on your knees, gasping, suffocating, and the sidewalk in front of you melts into a river, flowing down and away. This feels like that, right now, like you're in a concrete river flowing toward something you can't see.

5. This

     It's got to be the window, because there's so much glass today, all over the floor where your bed used to be. It takes two paper bags to clean it up.

     You barely even peek around the corner into the bathroom. The eye glistens now, and there's a thin creek of blood to the drain. Just thinking about the bird makes your head heavy and hot.

     Tonight you won't fall asleep. You sit on your desk and stare at the window, curtains aside. Your reflection stares back at you, growing denser as the day darkens into night, and still denser, until it's almost a mirror.

     You remember your wife biting her lower lip and blood leaking out the corner of her mouth. If you were ever married at all. The memory is incomplete, and trying to force it causes something to twist in your chest, and that's when a small shadow flaps in the heart of your reflection a half-beat before the window implodes glass. You throw your hands over your face and remain still into the following silence.

     With cool air eddying around you, you bring your arms down. Your window is broken—a jagged, toothy mess. On the floor, in the middle of a murder of broken glass, is a small dark shape that you think must be a bird, but it isn't. It's a cell phone. You pick it up and stare at it, trying to understand why it looks like a cell phone when it can't possibly be a cell phone. After a moment, it lights up and rings no bird song. The name "Tim" flashes on the screen. You push talk and a women's shattered voice crinkles wetly in your ear. That's when a black shape flits through the air to your right. You barely have time to see the flash of its frenetic trajectory before it passes through the room and out the broken window, disappearing into the dark like an anchor into sea water.

     You remember sex with your wife. You remember her flinching away from her own orgasm, curling up like a shrimp on a skillet, cursing you, pushing you, and you kneel before her, your erection wavering comically uncertain as your thoughts clatter into place like the ridges of a key sliding through the tumbler, waiting to understand what's happening—waiting to understand why there's broken glass where your bed used to be.

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     Mischa DeNola is the author of fourteen works of procrastination. Years after he's dead, he hopes someone will find an unfinished manuscript in a storage unit that even his wife (hopefully Bjork, Amy Sedaris, or James McAvoy) didn't know about, and it will be completed by a teary-eyed team of authors (hopefully Clive Barker, Amy Bloom, David Mitchell, Dan Chaon, and Kelly Link) to great critical acclaim and posthumously awarded awards (hopefully all of them). Until then, he is sure to throw himself about the apartment dramatically in what he imagines is writerly despair.

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