I had tried to block out a good bit of my childhood.

To be six, I could hardly picture it now. “I wish my brother were here,” Antoinette said. “I like the mouse,” I said, though I wasn’t a child. There were young mothers with their children, and the puppets were colorful animals, more colorful than real animals would be. The front and back of my own head too.Īt a corner we stopped to watch a puppet show. The back of her head as she looked out at the city. In the buildings and in Antoinette, her shoulder to her hand. Out on the street we were both different I felt connected to something around us, something good, though I don’t know if I could say or even describe what that was. Antoinette didn’t have the same freedoms I did-she lived with her family still- but she walked with me for a while. When we finished our cleaning, we went out into the evening and it was a relief, to be done with work and going wherever we chose. “Yes, but he’ll be poor and he’ll wear an ugly suit.” “You’ll love him anyway.” “I want a husband,” she said again out of nowhere. There were people who had no coat at all, who instead had to pile on shirts and sweaters. The truth was that sometimes, if it wasn’t freezing, I didn’t even wear my coat in winter I was so ashamed of it, but I didn’t say this to Antoinette I didn’t want to give her ideas, wrong ones. I don’t think she ever looked at the art. “My dress is ugly,” she said, sighing, looking at herself in the large windows. “Help me here, and then we’ll do that room together.” Antoinette dusted, barely, while I finished my mopping. Amina Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short stories, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. “I don’t like when it’s my turn to clean it.” I usually hear things coming from the vents.” “I was in the gallery with the armor,” she said, “and I thought I heard something, but I always think that.” The click-clack of shoes and Antoinette appeared, the hallway dark behind her.

Indelicacy cain