In between the man and the woman: broken glass and a bunch of roses loosely tied together by a pink satin ribbon. They both look down at it.

“The water will stain the wood,” the man says.

“I know,” the woman says.

“The house is old. The floors are no good.”

“I know.”

The day before, when the man came home, the mirror was broken. The day before that—the teacups and the saucers. Crumbs of porcelain all over the kitchen table.

Weeks before that, and the man does not know this, a heat wave welled up in the woman’s body. She decided to stay home and sit in front of the TV and drink cold water and sweat it out. But the heat did not pass. She simmered and crackled like firewood. She moved around the house like a thunderstorm and stood still like a volcano. She bled smoke and cried plumes of it.

Years before that, the woman had been nineteen and full of rage. Then twenty and full of rage. All that rage was placed there by someone else and it had nowhere to go. Her rage ebbed inside of her like oil in a barrel. She wielded her rage like something that could hurt other people. She had grown up around people who hurt other people and never understood the kind of rage that propelled them. But now it has made a home of her, too. But she never intended this. She did not want to be a victim nor a perpetrator nor sit with vengeance crackling inside her volcano heart. So she welded that rage behind the metal of her skin. But time moves, years pass. She was beginning to corrode.

And now everything is breaking. She eyes the broken vase on the floor in front of her. The flowers are sad. The man is sad. The grim kind of sadness that sits on his face like a mask. She can’t bear to see his sadness anymore.

She brushes past him, her skin white-hot. She takes quick steps down the stairs, her fingers bruising the banister as she goes down. The varnish on the stairs melts and the wood starts to splinter. The man always complains about working all day and coming back to a broken home. The man does not realize that this house is not a home but a meteor, somewhere out in space. The man does not realize that they’re on a time limit. This house is a meteor and it will collide with the Earth. This house will be the end of everything and it will be her fault.

The man follows her down the stairs, dodging the charred holes in the steps. The woman is in the kitchen, crouching down in front of a cabinet.

“We can fix things,” the man says. “The house will be fine and your fever will pass.”

The man does not realize that the house will continue to splinter. The wood will rot. Time keeps them on the same trajectory.

Inside the cabinet, there is a void. She crawls forward, submerging half of her body in it, with her legs still under the kitchen light. She’s sure the man is talking, but she can’t hear him anymore. She hears a deep rumbling, an echoing. She hears something small and tinny, bobbing this way and that. It floats closer. It straightens itself into a voice.

“I know it hurt you, but these things happen,” says her mother, a person who hurts other people. “It happened in the past. It will happen again. It is happening right now.”

The problem is that this house is a meteor and she cannot leave and they’re flying over Mars and Earth is looming even bigger in front of them now. The problem is that the woman is the house and the meteor and the end of the world.

She gazes into the dark expanse. Outer space. Time occurs in the form of a distant star—a white, shimmering speck. She pinches it between her fingers and pulls. It unravels into a bright, glowing thread. She keeps it pulled taut. On the thread, there is a man and a woman. They run across it and yell at each other and play like little kids. She watches them for a long time. Or maybe it isn’t a long time. She isn’t sure. Regardless, they play. They run from one end of the thread to the other. They brush up against her index finger and laugh when they bounce off of her skin. But eventually, the thread breaks. It snaps in two. Eventually, this is what always happens. They fall into the chasm of nothing. The woman watches them go. She looks at the little bit of time that she has left in her palm with dry eyes. It looks like a little tadpole of white light. It wriggles and shudders and jerks from one side to the other. The woman recognizes this movement. The same way her mother breathes.