2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

11:11 P.M

Madeleine sings into a pale silver microphone, her favorite instrument the stand-up bass running like a low-grade fever in and out of the rooms of her dreams.

In the back room of The Cat’s Pajamas, Alex suits up. He wants his father to hear him and know he can play. Not only hear him, but hear him.

“No.” John McCormick halts his little sister, who was going for the door again.

Jill returns to her chair. She stabs at her wooden duck with a paintbrush filled with Winter Grain Green. It is impossible to concentrate on her mallard when her parents are fighting. Her other brother, Norman, paints the belly of his Northern Pintail with Stone Cottage Gray. John paints his duck with John-like caution. He pauses between applications to consider the ruckus in the other room, or to give a gentle no to his sister, who wants to go in and soothe. But then they’d get in trouble for not being in bed, or worse.

On the other side of the door, their parents use words like whore and dickhead.

“Do you think my duck is sad?” Jill says.

“North American mallards,” John pretends to read, “are among the world’s happiest ducks. When winter comes, they fly in happy families to Latin America.”

Jill readjusts her glasses. She considers her duck with this new information. Steve, she’s named him. “Steve?” she tests.

The unmistakable sound of a slap makes even John place his brush down on the palette. “Don’t go in there,” he says, before Jill even leaves her chair.

In the back bedroom of her family’s row home, Clare Kelly dozes on her chaise lounge, busted leg propped on a pillow, dreaming of GLORY and THIGH GAPS.

Louisa Vicino heats popcorn on her brother’s stovetop. She catches sight of herself in the kitchen window, so serious, shaking kernels in the pan. She gives herself a shimmy. Laughs. Gives herself another shimmy. Unfurls one arm, then the other. She can feel the snakes’ smooth, pearlized skins, their buttery breaths on her neck, the pleasant squeeze as they wind around her belly.

Her brother calls from the other room. “How’s that popcorn coming?”

Louisa goes into a split on the kitchen’s unforgiving floor. Hand flourishes. One last shimmy. Big finish.

Principal Randles wants a nightcap with the tax attorney. Dinner concludes over two modest pieces of mochi. He slips a credit card into the bill. “Would you like to …”

“I would love to,” she says.

He is noticeably relieved. “I know just the place.”

In the deep moss of cigar smoke, Sarina reglosses her lips and wishes for strength. She switches off the light and closes the door. Ben is where she left him, only now a man in a gray suit is pumping his hand like an oil rig, a man who, Sarina realizes with pain when he pivots to greet her, is her ex-husband, Marcos.