I took away the sopping towel and pushed it under the couch. It would stain the carpet. It had dripped on my dress. I hadn’t thought to bring in a bowl.

With her underwear back around her hips and her dress straightened, I roused her.

–Well. You should feel better – cooler – right away, and you’ll notice the other changes in a day or less. Once your body catches onto the change in your blood.

I put my hands over the stains in my lap.

–Oh, Ada.

She was laughing as she sat up, keeping her knees together and pointing her bunched toes toward her shoes. Laughing like she hadn’t a care. The fine wrinkles around her eyes deepened in time to her irises flaring.

Her eyes were a dark, deep green. The colour reminded me of the patch of ground ’round the side of the house. That sliver of earth the sun never hits, where the barest hint of moss festers in the wet shade.

Agatha Bond

I liked them fine. They could always do something for you. You always left feeling better.

It was the burying I couldn’t get my head around.

In the ground. Not dead, just asleep – and for days.

I used to worry that something would go wrong and I’d wake up buried. Wake up dead.

That was the only thing.

Well. That and talking to them afterwards. About what they’d seen.

How do you talk to someone who’s been inside you?

Who’s seen more of you than you’ve seen of yourself?

Father met Lorraine in the hall and I lifted the sagging towel into my lap and carried it up to the bathroom, making a sac out of the front of my dress. It landed without ceremony in the bath and pooled toward the drain. I pulled my soiled dress over my head and tossed it in, too, and quickly all the cloth stewed into one. I heard her on the porch, heard a car in the drive.

Father came and stood in the doorway.

–Well?

–The usual. It was fine.

–What did you tell her?

–The usual. It was all the usual.

–She’s coming back next week.

I leaned forward to turn on the tap. It sputtered at first, the smell of the old drains filling up the small damp room.

–Why?

–She wants to keep going with it. To keep getting flushed out.

–But it’s all gone.

–She’s set on it. Says she’ll pay the same each time.

The water was coming strong now and I rolled my eyes.

–Father.

–She kept saying how she never felt better.

–You wouldn’t let this pass it if it was you who had to sit with her.

–There are worse ways to spend time.

And so Lorraine kept coming back for what she called her ‘treatment’.

It was dull work, in that it was no work at all. I put her to sleep and waited a little while, sometimes singing a tune that would see her wake up cool.

As I’ve said, women Cures wanting their change sped up wasn’t uncommon – the same women who went back to work when their newborns were still gasping for air. But Lorraine had never worked in the fields. Mr Languid had had his own land. She’d no reason to put a rush on anything.

Her work had been what the other women called clipped-wing work, which also meant there were habits she couldn’t shake. She was determined, for instance, to soothe us and feed us. To give us things we didn’t need.

It was a quiet time of year, with autumn’s onset seeing less work in the fields and Cures more eager to spend time amongst themselves, so often once she woke up she could see no reason to leave.

–No other visitors today, Ada?

And then she’d lie back on the couch and shuffle through the box of postcards she carried around, telling me she brought them especially for me. With her knees gathered up to her chest I’d watch her finger their soft edges, and one day it struck me that Lorraine was the first Cure I’d ever known who’d once lived elsewhere. Her eyes had not always fallen first thing on our lemony horizon, and she’d not spent all her summers taking heed of the terracotta ground.

The postcards were inscribed with quick notes in coloured ink, from Lorraine to Lorraine, mentioning to her future self the pastries of a particular street and the cobblestones of another, a corner where hems were lifted and soles peeled from their shoes. She was always turning to me and starting stories she couldn’t finish, flapping a hand whenever a name escaped her, the unlit cigarette between her fingers losing its tobacco in fluttering slivers of yellow and brown.

Or else, she’d busy herself around the house. Her body wakeful and well, loud and unyielding. I can hear them still, the sounds she made: the harsh spittle sound rocking across her tongue and clinging to her teeth, the pimpled skin of her inner thighs shifting against one another other like the sheaths of a winter dress, her breasts damply filling the cups of her brassiere, like wet leaves tightly packed in a drain. The sigh of her body sinking into the cushions while her hair, falling away from her face, gave up its lacquered curls.

I found myself nodding along to the constant hum of her thoughts and catching sight of her bright, bright dreams.

She never wanted to go.

Often I figmented other imminent Cures to shift her.

Perhaps more than the noises she made and the hot white sun, those weeks are marked for me still by a taste of blood – everywhere, a taste of blood. Like the air was filled with copper flakes.