By Dorthe Nors, from an unpublished collection of short stories. Nors is the author of four novels and one previous story collection. A volume of her novellas, So Much for That Winter, will be published by Graywolf in June. Translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra.

Then we were sitting there, Lilly and me, and she had made coffee and baked one of those chocolate cakes that are soft in the middle. During the afternoon she’d also vacuumed and cleared the dead leaves off the windowsills. The budgie was no longer chattering in its cage, it had been put…