Amelia Gray: AM/PM

“I just had a terrible dream,” Martha said.

Emily turned to look at her. “You were sleeping?”

Martha flicked on the turn signal, changed lanes. “I dreamt we were in a awful car accident,” she said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

It wasn’t that much of a coincidence, really, as they were weaving through late-night traffic. It bothered Emily more to think that Martha had been asleep at the wheel, though surely it was just an expression.

“It was a bad dream,” Martha said. “We were in an accident, and I was okay.”

“Did I have a bar through my head?”

Martha shook her head and blinked. Emily realized she was staring.

“You weren’t okay,” Martha said.

“I’m okay now,” Emily said, turning to look out the window again. Without looking back, she reached across the seat divider, found Martha’s hand, and held it.

Betty cracked the crust of her crème brûlée with the edge of her spoon. “This is a symbol of my love for you,” she said.

“You’ve said that about a lot of things,” Simon said. “You said that about the entrée as well. And the bottle of wine.”

“It’s all true,” she said. “Your cup of coffee is a symbol of my love for you. This spoon. Our waiter. The ceiling. Your fingernails. The crack in that windowpane. The cars parked outside. My shoes. Your shoes. The pastry chef. This tablecloth.”

“What about the flowers?” he asked, gesturing to the buds in a vase between them.

She looked at him. “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Frances ate fish at all meals. In the morning, when the newspaper came, she ate a bagel with lox. Mid-day, she would prefer something light, like tuna in olive oil, but at night she would make cod fried with polenta, rich seafood stews, baked salmon, seared tuna rolled in pepper and sea salt. She declared that she would eat fish until the day she died, and then she would eat fish as an angel.

As the days went on, her fish consumption grew simpler. She ate fish as a singular pursuit. She ate alone, with her back to the door, the fish alone on a plate, without spices or sauces. She stopped cooking rice and vegetables. She drank a glass of water before the fish and a glass of bourbon after. She ate the fish from a white plate, and the fish was white against the plate. When the fish was gone, she licked the white plate.

When Missy or Chastity called, Frances talked about her day in relation to fish.

She would say, “I just ate some fish,” or “I am about to cook some fish, broil it perhaps.”

Her friends silently wondered when they would be invited for dinner, and then they began to wonder it aloud, but she never had a solid answer for them.

She would say, “I’m sorry, I only defrosted enough fish for one.”

When her friends pressed her to make future plans, Frances seemed confused. Her friends decided she was demurring and stopped calling, because they were all sensitive people. She was sensitive, too, and didn’t understand why they stopped calling.

Carla snapped the tines off the plastic fork with her thumb. “No matter how deeply I bury you in the gravel pit of my memory,” she said, “you come crawling back out.”

“There’s no need for poetry,” Andrew said. “I’m just here for my chair.”

“I’m eating,” she said.

“You just broke your fork.”

“See, Andrew, that’s just how you are. It’s no damn business of yours how I eat, and what I eat with. What if I brought this fork to the door just to show you how serious I am?”

“All I’m saying is, you’re not eating right now, and I want my chair back.”

“I want those years back,” Carla said. “I want my youth back.”

“You may have your youth,” Andrew said. He had a bag with him, and he reached into the bag and pulled out a small, carved box. He handed it to her and she held it with both hands.

“Sorry I kept it for so long,” Andrew said.

Carla took a step back to let him in. “Your chair is in the kitchen,” she said.

Terrence and Leonard grew up in Dallas and moved to different cities at the same time. They were bored with Dallas. All the women in Dallas were preternaturally interested in the fact that they were twins, though they were grown by then and had exhausted all avenues for conversation regarding their twinship.

Of course, luck would have it that the woman Terrence was starting to feel comfortable around would squeal and hold her palms together when she learned he was a twin.

“Who’s older?” June asked, resting her chin on her upturned palms. It was the most excited she’d been all evening, even after he told his humorous stories from his job at the collections agency.

“He is, by thirteen minutes.” Terrence couldn’t stop fussing with a dollop of glitter glue on the Formica table between them. He was trying to edge his fingernail under it.

“What did your mother do in that thirteen minutes?” June asked. “Have a cigarette? Wonder, ‘is this second one really worth it’?”

Terrence laughed politely. “Right,” he said, answering none of the questions. June had no way of knowing that his mother was long dead, and she seemed nice enough that she would have been embarrassed if he mentioned it.

“Anyway,” June said. Saying “anyway” was a conversational tic of hers, it seemed, as she had resorted to it three times over the course of an hour.

Missy shrugged. “What I want to know is,” she said, dropping her fork into a puddle of maple syrup, “why does everyone keep talking about how fat Frances is?”

“Who’s Frances?” Chet asked. Missy and Chet had been married for six months.

“Oh my God,” said Chastity, at that moment breastfeeding her three-year-old son. “Frances is so plump.”

“She’s plump!” Missy said. “Exactly! She’s pleasantly plump. I mean, there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.” She pinched the thin layer of fat on her own belly.

Chastity made a face. “I’ll never be that plump,” she said, shifting her weight. The boy toothed her nipple and she winced.

“Not as long as you keep up that tit lipo,” Missy said, mostly for the benefit of Chet, who hadn’t stopped staring since Chastity unbuttoned her blouse and hauled it out.

Missy plunged her fork into the last square of her french toast, swirling it around and thinking of all the opportunities for pain she had missed in her life. “Frances is so fat,” she said, satisfied.

They found Tess in the center of her living room with her legs folded neatly under her. The pose suggested that she had received sudden and shocking news, and had to sit down immediately to allow her body to catch up with the emotional significance.

The rope hung loose from the rafters, still on her neck, its frayed ends spun out behind her like a child’s toy. The shoe on the table, five feet from the girl, suggested that she swung about eight horizontal feet before the rope broke. You could imagine the look on her face.

One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.

Carla stepped out of the dressing room and took a modest turn. “How do I look?” she asked.