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She is still on the stairs. With no light at the top of the stairs switched on and the light at the bottom switched off, we see her only when the door to the refrigerator is open, which projects the light or reflects it. Sometimes she is reflected on the refrigerator door. Also when we open the crisper drawer. Also when we open a can in the refrigerator of beer or soft drink. The picture on the wall picks up refrigerator light and reflects it, for physics reasons her too. A narrow band of refrigerator light, in which the shelves of the door and sometimes the gasket are visible, and sometimes the hem of her bathrobe, which is red. Sometimes the tint of her wrist, which is prosthetic. When the light is favorable, a quarter of the stair railing can be seen in parallelepiped light, and so can the fingers of the prosthetic. Occasionally, the toes of the prosthetic if the bathrobe is not resting over them. Our brother likes to call up that lunch is ready. He likes to open and shut the crisper drawer to create an illusion of activity, so that she will come prepare lunch. He opens the crisper drawer to create sound and emit a smell of celery and the light hits the glass of the picture, which shows a German man making a shoe. This man, a cobbler, has an open mouth that trails a line of text that reads Ve get too zoon oldt und too late schmart. Our brother looks up the stairs but cannot see her reaction on account of the light and the bandages.
At the back door are two figures we do not look at. The back door is at the rear of the sunroom extension we did not reuse after Nana died. Before Nana died the windows and the window of the door were covered with squares of cardboard to keep the light from falling on Nana. The disassembled hospital bed pieces stand in the northwest corner, not by the door, but against the wall that faces the pantry. At the touch of the wheels of the bedframe one corner of the cardboard square in the west window has slipped, emitting light, but the figures do not look in. The portable commode in the center of which the sealed bucket sits stands in the southwest corner, near the door hinges, while on the opposite side of the doorframe a plywood console holds a coffee-stained coaster. In the northeast corner a standing roll-top desk has not been maintained. Inside are documents we do not grasp. Between the desk and the console a swivel chair emits yellow foam from a split in the faux leather where the dog buries its snout to pull more out onto the spider-brown carpet. A degraded polyester room divider installed for Nana’s privacy prevents us from looking at the figures at the back door. One is invisible but for the steam of a cigarette that flies past the eye of the other in the triangular slit in the window where the cardboard square has slipped. The second figure says She’s my mother too, either to the first figure or to us, the dog when it enters the room to extract more foam from the swivel chair, to itself, or to no one in particular. Its open, brown-irised eye is almost perfectly framed by the slit in the cardboard barrier and the lattice of the window.
In the hall closet, fallen from a hook at bar height, in a bright lime pile is an apron showing little wear and a text in white cursive that reads What are you making today? In the winter our older brother drove our middle brother to Grohman Outlets to collect or submit applications to businesses in the strip. One, a JoAnn Fabrics, called him back, though they had misread our middle brother’s name because he had filled the form against a cinderblock wall, which gave his data a wavy, insubstantial look. The cashier, a woman in her forties, Noor, called him the following Tuesday with strict instructions on what to wear. Khaki pants or jeans if necessary, a solid shirt, white, black, or navy. He chose jeans and navy, which he thought was black. He received the apron from Noor and worked a shift in little-visited aisles, the back, and the bathroom. He was unable to use the label maker because he was unable to ask how it worked. On Thursday the manager was told he was a no-call, no-show, which she confirmed when she tried to call. When a coat was removed from the closet the apron fell to the floor and was not reinstalled on the hook. A layer of fur has accumulated and a smell emanates from the waistband, where the dog has repeatedly relieved himself.
This window unit resists description because when it is touched the front panel falls out, as does the brown, unplugged cable. The panel, when replaced, does not reattach cleanly and the hand that guides it does not apply much effort because of the metal discs and coils it has revealed, which look sharp, but are not, and the coarse black mesh that intervenes between the panel and the parts and looks, but is not, like fiberglass. We avoid the window unit because it makes noise, both when the sun comes out and heats it and when the bodies of insects creep through it, even though they have never penetrated the interior of the house. Nor are they visible on the exterior, which is concealed by privets. Plastered to the exhaust fan with the woody spittle of the queen wasp is a sizable nest of hazelnut-brown pulp, sparsely inhabited, from which emerge the beings whose hollow scratchings are sometimes audible on the other side of the wall (hollow in part because their bodies are full of hollows, or rather pockets of air). Sometimes, but not since autumn. It was built in spring and abandoned when winter arrived. In spring, again, a new nest will appear beside it, spat into shape by a new queen’s mandibles, with which she scrapes wood fiber from the nearest trees and lowest shingles of the extension roof. This object, shaped like a head of garlic, modular, filed into hexagons, houses yellow egg sacs in some cells and photosensitive larvae in others, hidden beneath thin white panels. These cells are so fragile they could be swept away by the mild fingertip of a workman’s glove if disturbed, empty, in the autumn. Scent-wise, the nest is indistinguishable from brown wrapping paper, save for the faint, milky sourness of the queen wasp’s saliva. It shakes when the insects alight, depart, or move in any way. The entrances to the cells are so thin and narrow that the wasps can barely poke their heads out or shudder dewily when the dawn light awakens them, easing life into their bodies as it illuminates the panels and hex walls, which murmur as the wood warms and expands. They rest with faces fixed on the spreading light as the walls shake around their heads and beneath their limbs. Even a light breeze sets it all in motion, there is no stillness anywhere. The nest rises and falls perceptibly under them, the water from the night rain beats into their faces but quickly evaporates as the light spreads over the latticework, while below, under the panels, the larvae, with their rudimentary senses, discern the light as the red underland of a closed eyelid, flickering with the motion of particulates and speared with light in one or two imperfections of the surface, beyond which the cylindrical silhouettes of mature specimens spread like ink as they depart the open cells.
