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“And I did it,” I said, “everywhere you told me to. I put a cube in each place. Dad, I swear, I did what you told me to do.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

One of my sister’s contained laughs bubbled in her throat.

“He must be lying,” she said. Then she imitated a pair of legs with two fingers, making them walk. “Those cubes can’t grow feet and walk off on their own, you know.”

“You be quiet,” Dad cut in.

From the hallway, my brother started to sing to himself. “He’s lyyyyyyying! He’s lyyyyyyying! He’s lyyyyyyying!”

“I swear I laid them, Dad—”

“He’s lyyyyyyying!”

“—I remember it perfectly.”

This time my sister couldn’t contain her laughter. She laughed until my father grabbed her by the neck and squeezed, forcing her to be quiet. Then he dragged her down the hall by her head. “You’re hurting me,” I think she said. It was hard to understand her. Dad shoved her into her bedroom. Mom came out after Dad beckoned her with his head. He slammed the door closed. The baby started crying again.

“And shut that child up,” he yelled at the closed door. “This door won’t open until—”

“May I?” Grandma had appeared at some point. She wrapped one of her hands, wrinkled by time and the fire, around the same door handle that Dad was gripping. “May I?” she repeated.

She was speaking in a calm way, gently defying my father’s authority. “I need to get in. I sleep here, too.”

Dad hesitated for a few seconds. Then he came away from the door to let her past.

Grandma turned the handle. The baby’s crying emerged from inside the room. “Thank you very much,” she said. “And goodnight.”

She closed the door with great care.

Dad glared at me. “I can’t ask you to do anything.” He reached me with one stride and knelt in front of me. With a finger outstretched, he turned my face until we were both looking into the bathroom.

“How do you think you’ll sleep in that bathtub?” he asked.

“Please,” Mom said, “there’s no need for any of this.”

He pushed me inside the bathroom. The floor was cold. “Tell me, how do you think you’ll sleep in that tub?” he said again.

I shrugged.

“Well, you can tell me tomorrow,” he announced. And he closed the door.

13

The banging woke me up. With my eyes open in the dark, my legs pressed against the cold ceramic of the bathtub, I attuned my ears. I expected to hear the Cricket Man’s sack, too, dragging along the ground up above.

More bangs. One after the other, but soft. On the door. Someone was knocking. I waited for a few seconds before poking my head out. I lifted a corner of the shower curtain, carefully, so the metal hoops it hung from wouldn’t make any noise. The door opened then without the hinges making a sound, as if whoever had opened it only wanted to leave it ajar. My eyes, accustomed to the dark, made out a new shape beside the door. Whoever it was moved, and I heard the familiar sound of fabric rustling. I smiled.

I got out of the bathtub in the direction of the door, the shower curtain rattling when I went through it. With my arms held out in front of me feeling the air, I reached the place where the shape was.

I touched it.

It was what I’d imagined.

My pillow.

I felt the material, searching for whatever was holding it up. I found a hand. I stroked it with my fingers, recognizing its bumps. The wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles, the circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb, the wide, smooth scar near the wrist. It was my mother’s hand.

I squeezed it gently to tell her she could let go. Her nose whistled from the other side of the wood. The door closed.

I went back to the bathtub.

I closed the curtain again and lay back.

I hugged the pillow inside that cold white ceramic bed.

I slept.

The pipes whistling woke me up again. The water was running in the sink. On the other side of the curtain, someone had turned it on, but the light in the bathroom was still off. Only Grandma would use the bathroom without switching on the light. I breathed, trying to smell her talcum powder.

Then I heard a cough that I recognized. It wasn’t my grandmother’s, but my sister’s. She hadn’t seen Dad punish me by making me spend the night in the bathtub. Maybe she didn’t know I was there. Which was why she hadn’t knocked on the door. But why hadn’t she turned on the light?

There was another cough. It was actually a wetter sound than a cough. A retch. I waited to hear the vomit hitting the sink, but it didn’t. She just hawked the spit and snot from her throat.

She also groaned in a way I could barely hear. When she sighed a few times, I thought she might be crying. There was a high-pitched screech when she turned the handle again, followed by a louder flow of water. If the shower curtain hadn’t been closed, the drops I heard splashing against the plastic would’ve reached me. Then the gargling started. A gurgle and then the mouthful of water falling into the basin. Followed by a moan, or rather, a stifled whimper. She repeated the exercise several times. I wanted to peek out by lifting a corner of the curtain, like I had before, but the sticky sound of the skin on my hand when I peeled it from the tub ended any attempt to move. If my sister didn’t know I was there, if she thought I was sleeping in my bunk like I did every night, she may not be wearing her mask. In the darkness of the room I might not manage to see her deformed face, but I could perhaps make out some grotesque contour. The flat profile of a noseless face.

I recognized the sound of the soap dish sliding a little. It was fish-shaped and it gripped the soap with plastic scales. Its three resting points squeaked when they slipped along the ceramic sink. The bubbling and friction I heard next told me that my sister was washing her hands. It was for longer than even Mom spent washing hers after chopping garlic in the kitchen. The sound of my sister washing her hands was followed by a flicking sound that was repeated five times. Then the curtain moved and a piece of material landed on my chest.

I used the hand I’d peeled from the bathtub to touch it, feeling the circular contour of a button. It was the blouse my sister slept in. I understood that she’d undone the five buttons before leaving the blouse on the edge of the bathtub. Where I was.

There was also an elastic sound, but not the one made by the strap on her mask. I remembered her taking off her bra the afternoon when we’d had a bath together. The garment fell onto the blouse. One of the straps brushed against my shoulder. The soap dish skidded again. It was followed by some kind of friction sound. It wasn’t two hands soaping each other. It was different. There were more muffled whimpers, like the ones Grandma gave sometimes when she was sitting in the living room, her face in the direction of the wall for an entire afternoon.

Another noise broke through the darkness of that bathroom that my sister and I shared without her knowing it. A noise from out in the hallway. My sister drew in her breath. The bar of soap hit the washbasin. The bra strap and bottom of her blouse escaped from the bath as fast as wasps retract their sting after using it. The quick movement made the hoops holding up the curtain tinkle. I also heard the door latch clicking into place.

My sister had left.

The bathroom was silent again.

The apparent peace lasted a few seconds.

Until the bathroom light suddenly came on. I held my hands over my eyes to ease the pain from being dazzled.

“So,” I heard my father’s voice say, “how’s your night going?”

The curtain was thrown open with a metallic racket. The sudden light and deafening noise made it hard to believe I was in the same place where a moment before a fly would’ve given away its position just from the noise of its heartbeat. Even if a fly’s heart is nothing more than a throbbing organ that pumps hemolymph and not blood.

“Sleep well in there?”

I opened my eyes and could only make out stripes of light through my hands. The curtain rail made its noise again. Dad was shaking it. When my vision finally got used to the bright light, I could see my father’s silhouette, a diagonal line that ran from the left of my field of sight to the center. Like how a corpse would see the figure of its burier.

I blinked to focus better. At first I thought he was naked, his torso marked by the flames like a choppy sea of dark flesh, but then I saw the worn elastic of his sky-blue cotton underpants. I looked at him without saying anything, detecting a smile on his face from the shape his hair scar had taken. “Where did you get that pillow?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. In response to my silence, Dad let go of the curtain, which then dangled between us like a plastic barrier.

I tucked my legs in as I raised my back until I managed to sit myself up in the bathtub. Then I lifted the corner of the curtain to poke one eye out without making the hoops jingle. I saw Dad standing in front of the toilet bowl, his back to me. He had the key hanging from his neck on his back and the elastic on his underpants down, so I could see part of a vertical line of black hair. I saw him use toilet paper to dry himself with in front, as Mom insisted I did whenever I’d finished peeing, although now I hadn’t heard a trickle. He did it while looking down and then to one side, looking out perhaps for any movement of mine behind the curtain. I was scared that my hand’s trembling would be reproduced in the portion of material on which he kept watch.

I discovered two pairs of scratches crossing his back diagonally, from his spine outward. Two new wounds on creased skin. He didn’t seem bothered about them at all.

He threw the piece of paper into the toilet and pulled the chain. He stood watching the mechanism work. We had to stay to the end to make sure it drained out properly. It often didn’t, and Dad would get angry if he found dirty water in there when it was his turn to use it. Once it was broken for a few days, so we had to use the washbasin to get rid of liquids. For the other, we used the bin.

The last sucking noise preceded the dripping that filled the cistern. Dad pulled up his underpants, which was when I carefully lowered the corner of the curtain. It didn’t make a noise. I sat looking at the plastic.

His voice came from the other side.

“I discipline you so you learn to follow the rules of this house, and you break them a minute later?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

His fingers appeared at one end of the curtain. He pulled it. I sat there looking at him.

Dad was holding the pink bar of soap in his free hand.

“When you use this”—he raised his eyebrows to look first at the soap and then at me—“you put it back where it belongs.”

He let go of the curtain and returned the soap bar to the dish. The same fish-shaped dish whose sliding I’d heard in the darkness before my sister had again and again washed her hands, mouth, and whatever else she’d washed.

“It’s not so hard, is it?” my father said.

I wanted to tell him it had been my sister, but Dad didn’t even give me time to speak. With a snort of contempt he closed the curtain. I heard him turn the water on once more before the light went out and the bathroom door slammed shut, followed just after by his bedroom’s metal door.

I stayed sitting in the bathtub for a few minutes. With my eyes open looking at nothing. I got up, grabbed a towel, and dried all the water that had been splashed on the washbasin, curtain, floor, and mirror.

That way Dad wouldn’t find a reason to tell me off.

I got back in the tub and made myself comfortable. If I lay on my side and bent my knees a certain way, hugging the pillow, it wasn’t too bad. I lifted a corner of the pillowcase to pinch the material inside. I stroked the soft fabric between my fingers again and again.

Then I heard the chirp of a cricket. A few chirps. A shiver ran down my back each time.

I covered my ears. I thought of my fireflies, on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t see it, but I knew they’d be glowing.

14

My mother came to see me in the morning. “You can come out now,” she said.

And I must’ve been deep asleep despite how uncomfortable my hard, curved bed was, because somehow I absorbed her sentence into the dream I was having, where I saw myself standing in front of the locked door in the kitchen. Scratching the concrete. Then my mother had said the sentence, and a vertical line of yellow light had appeared around the door’s edge, growing wider and wider.

The beam of light kept getting thicker as the door shrank.

It was opening.

“You can come out now,” my mother said again.

And then the door disappeared completely. And I looked through it with my face reddened by the bright blast of light that came from outside. Like what happened to my cactus under the spot of light in the living room. The same particles of dust that danced between its prickles while I pushed it with my finger along the floor now danced between my eyelashes. I could feel the light’s heat on my cheeks.

But that second time, my mother’s sentence was followed by a rattle.

A noise that couldn’t be absorbed into the dreamworld I was in. Because it was a very familiar noise. The shower curtain as it was drawn back. Reality began to take shape around me while the light that illuminated me from the other side of that dreamed door went out.

The cold pressure on my leg replaced the heat from the light that didn’t exist.

The white of the ceramic bathtub blanked out the yellow from the outside as soon as I opened my eyes.

“I said you can come out now,” said my mother for the third time. One of her hands rested on my face. I smiled. That warmth was much better than the one from the nonexistent light in a dream that I was already beginning to forget. I rubbed my cheek against her wrinkled palm. Her nose whistled.

“Thank you for bringing the pillow,” I whispered.

“A pillow?” she asked, holding back a smile. “Me?”

I stroked her hand the same way I had in the night. The wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles. The circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb. The wide, smooth scar near the wrist.

She received the message. “Come on, give it to me so I can take it to your room. Dad mustn’t know,” she said. She took hold of the pillowcase that emerged from between my legs and pulled. I sat up in the bathtub to make it easier for her.