The daughter. The one he hadn’t spoken to in six years. Mila didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
Mila thought about this. She thought about the bird on the sidewalk, the vending machine, the moldy bread. She thought about her grandfather’s funeral, which she’d attended in a stiff black dress, and how everyone had talked about what a good man he was, and how she’d felt nothing except the word rising up behind her ribs. Dism . Not grief. Just the hollow shape of grief, like a footprint after the foot is gone. The daughter
March 9: Sat with Mila at the diner. She talked about her mother’s birthday. How she sent a card but forgot to sign it. How her mother called to thank her anyway, pretending not to notice. We laughed. The coffee was terrible. The waitress called us “hon.” Outside, it started to rain. Dism? No. Something else. Something I don’t have a word for yet. Maybe that’s the point. Mila thought about this
But dism had begun to follow her more closely. It would tap her on the shoulder in the subway, just as the train pulled into a station she didn’t need. It would settle into the chair across from her at cafés, not speaking, just watching. On Tuesday nights, when Priya was out and the radiator clanked and the neighbor’s television murmured through the wall, dism would lie down beside her in the dark. It never touched her. That was the worst part. He flipped through it
The man tilted his head. For a moment she thought he would laugh, or politely change the subject. Instead, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a worn leather notebook. He flipped through it, licked his thumb, stopped on a page.
She started keeping a notebook. Not a diary—she’d tried those and filled them with stiff, performative entries about her day. This was different. She wrote down every instance of dism she could remember, then every new one as it arrived.