From Everything Flirts, which will be published next month by the University of Iowa Press.

I drove from Madison back to St. Louis, took the usual exit from the freeway, and got lost. There were so many roads. All of them were gray. I pulled into a parking lot and looked around the car for something with my address on it, but I’d cleaned out the dead mail and used tissues before driving up to Madison. The registration, the insurance still listed Wisconsin. I would have to call someone. To ask where I lived. I’d have to find a phone booth and remember all the numbers correctly, enter them perfectly, then hope the person I called was home to answer the phone. This felt impossible. So I sat in the car and drank water until I could picture my street, my first-floor apartment, the wide brick porch and the flowers I’d planted in front.

I walked into my apartment and turned on the computer, as I always did. I dialed into the server, the modem screeching as though it had something urgent to tell me. But there was nothing, no new messages. Before this, Alex had always sent some friendly thing for me to read at the end of my drive—what he was cooking for dinner, how much he already missed me. But today, freed of me, Alex was . . . preoccupied.

I stood by the computer, looking around the apartment. What did I do here?

I opened a bottle of wine. I couldn’t tell if I was hungry. I sat at the dining-room table, a green cast-aluminum table meant to be patio furniture. It had an ornate, leafy design with a hole in the center for an umbrella. Crumbs dropped through, but I liked it. I sat at the table, which was cold and solid, and drank several glasses of wine. I never did this. When I drank alone, I sat outside on the front steps watching fireflies. Or sat on the porch and read. Or sat at my desk and read or wrote.

The light over the table was too bright. It took me an hour to realize this. There was a box of matches on the table. There was a candle. I lit the candle and set it on the mantel above the fireplace, turned off all the other lights. In this shadow light I was drawn to shells on the mantel, shells collected in Florida the year before, when my sisters and my aunts gathered for my mother’s seventieth birthday. The red scallop had a dried seahorse inside it, about an inch long. Its eyes were missing, but what filled the sockets looked exactly like eyes: black centers.

Why was I so . . . is there a word for this? Living in suspended animation. The feeling that a clay figure in a stop-motion movie might have as it awaits the next arrangement of its material, which is its body and its world.