I . . . I really need to.

            She, herself, doesn't have cereal. She opens the refrigerator and randomly pulls out a cup of yogurt. It's vanilla, and as she pulls the foil off, it sounds like ripping skin: moist and sharp. She rummages in a drawer for a spoon with one hand while she lays the stiff foil on the counter carefully with the other. The crinkled silver is covered in a thin sheen of milky yogurt. The film reminds her, oddly enough, of mucus. The chill plastic of the container sticks to the skin of her hand, and she can feel Charlie looking at her--scrutinizing her--but she ignores him, and stares out the window over the sink at the sky.

            It's barely light out. The sky is a smudged sketch of an oil pastel--all soft edges and blurred lines, runny and melting like an ice-cream cone on a hot day. Its layered, wavy line upon wavy line, piled haphazardly from the angry pink of the horizon up. She thinks of sediment and the walls of the Grand Canon.

            The color flows unsteadily from bottom to top. First a thin, thread-like strip of pink rips raggedly along the rim of the sky: binding the seam of the world. After comes that swirling pearly pink-gray that you only see in the cusp of oyster shells, outlining the darkened shapes of buildings, brushed on like blush. Then come gray, true deep gray, like the sharp wings of a dove. Then there is slate gray and slate blue; then blue-gray and smoky yellow, drifting in and out of one another like drowsy lovers. Gray-white comes next, shocking in its paleness, then peach--the color firm and ripe.

            A strange gray-aqua, almost green, follows with the vagueness of a straggling child, then comes violet slate (almost silver) and a startling slash of charcoal. Pale blue-white, like milk, streaks messily between the darkness of the charcoal and the lighter smoke gray (so pale and insubstantial, it's almost not there) that makes up the next ragged ring. Smoke blue comes next, melting seamlessly into the final shade of peacock--rich and thrumming with color, arcing over the blackened city spires like a far-flung cloak. But for all the loveliness, she finds it's still shocking to see the layers building up in the void of the Towers along the New York skyline.

            Her own face is reflected back to her in the streaky windowpane. She examines it critically. She is a wide-jawed, high-cheeked, long-mouthed, large-eyed image, all transparent, all rimmed in palest pinkie-blue (redder, though, at her cheeks) and backlit by the kitchen lights behind her. She sees her countenance as both open and empty, and full and closed at the same time. This disturbs her, and she wonders about the paradox of the idea. She wonders if she's seeing only what she wants to see. She wishes she could ask Fred (as she always has before, but--somehow--can't now). The thought of asking Bosco rambles clumsily through her mind and stumbles over her thought of asking Fred, pulling down a chaotic mirad of things as it crashes through the brittle layers of her thoughts.

            Suddenly it's all she can do to just not burst into tears.

She turns away, eyes wide and blind, from the empty-full image in the watery window-glass. She turns inward to the kitchen cupboards, fingers searching mole-like for glasses before remembering that she has already put them out.

            I mean--

            She hears Emily in the bathroom and looks towards the clock, faintly concerned. Lately Emily takes far too much time in the bathroom before she goes to school. There have been instances when Emily has made all of them (or sometimes only some of them, as the case may be) late for work or school or both. Faith has also been perturbed about her daughter's mode of dress recently; it was too adult, too un-Emily. The mother in her rebels against the popular sex-kitten look her daughter has adopted, just as the prepubescent in Emily feels the need to rebel against the values her mother tries to imprint on her. She ascribes it to a hormonal-teenage thing and prays that she's right. She's not too sure she can handle this Emily for the rest of her life. She puts a spoonful of the sweetly bitter yogurt in her mouth and sucks on the spoon. She moves her tongue around the small, smooth scoop of metal, pulling it against her teeth and savoring the metallic coppery taste it leaves behind, like blood.

             Emily walks into the kitchen finally, sullen and defiant and proud in turns. The young girl is wearing a skinny magenta shirt that clings unattractively to her young body, straining over the small, hard knots of her maturing breasts. Emily is still at that awkward stage, between child, girl, and woman, where she can still afford to not wear a bra, but it is fast becoming apparent that she is no longer an 'it.' Low-riding jeans complete the outfit, revealing a pale line of (far too much, the mother thinks in dismay) milky-pink flesh between shirt-bottom and jeans-waist.

            The clothes, by themselves, might have been mild enough that she would have let it pass, if only for the reason that she was reluctant to break the quiet of the morning. Emily, though, had clearly been feeling a greater than usual need to defy her mother. She'd smeared her lips with bright cherry-red, and outlined her eyes with black, black kohl. It made those oh-so familiar heavy-lidded eyes into something bordering on obscene in someone so young. The daughter looks at her mother with eyes that are shaped like her own and colored in Fred's honest brown, and filled with something so belligerent--so flatly resentful--that it's disconcerting to see, and she has to look away.

            Emily tilts her chin up, and gives a glare of half triumph, half fear, and all rage. Emily, she knows, is old enough to understand what has transpired, despite the fact that she herself isn't entirely sure she understands. She feels like there has been a kind of monumental shift in the balance of the world that leaves her unsteady and uncertain.

            Look, I just thought we'd--I dunno. I should go. Sorry for bothering you.

            This, unlike Charlie's gentle rebellion of sugar, cereal, and milk, is something that she cannot ignore. She sucks once more on her spoon, then places it back in her yogurt, and makes a fluttering movement with her hands. She detests unnecessary gestures when speaking, and loathes that she is reduced to them. It takes her a moment to find her voice and then another to find her words.

            "Take that junk off," (one of her hands flits softly to her own face, light touching her own lips and eyes which are tingling in sympathy to her daughter's, pantomiming what she is talking about.) "All of it. You're not going to school like that." Emily's face pales and tightens with wordless fury, and she leaps up from the table and stalks sullenly into the bathroom. Fred emerges just as Emily slams the bathroom door. Charlie is staring at her silently, thoughtfully. She catches him looking at her and he glances away.

            Fred shakes his head, like a dog coming out of water or, better yet, like a bear. She thinks that this is an accurate analogy; Fred is like a bear. He gives off the feeling of height and compact power without actually being tall, or powerful. He is thick--thick muscles: thick flesh: thick features. She looks at his shoulders, his short, powerful neck and the square set of his jaw, and thinks; like a bear, just like a bear. Her partner though, she thinks, is wiry and lithe. Bosco has a swimmer's build, with a long, lightly muscled neck and broad, sloping shoulders. For some very odd reason, Bosco has always reminded her of an otter, all long and sleek and brown and sharp. She remembers a time when she was a young child, that she had been afraid of bears. She also remembers--with knife-edge clarity--that she has always like otters. They had been her favorite exhibits at the Zoo. Her husband looks at her and she finds herself hoping that he doesn't know what she's thinking in the frail shell of her skull. She tells herself that that's stupid, that that's impossible, but she doesn't look him in the eye. She looks at him slightly off-center, slightly over his shoulder, slightly above his head. Not at him.