Strawberries

june 1, 2026

She came down at quarter past two because the heat in the bedroom was an animal and the window opened to nothing.

Mira was at the counter with the door to the garden ajar. A bowl of strawberries between her hands. She had washed them already; the colander on the dish rack still held some of the water.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Wren said.

“No.”

That was the thing about Mira at this hour. She did not ask questions when she did not need to. She would have heard Wren on the stairs - heard her stop on the third step, where the wood gave because they had never had the will to fix it - and would have known already which of the kinds of sleeplessness it was. The one where Wren needed to talk. The one where she needed to be left alone in the same room. The one where she needed water and would sit at the counter and not say a word for forty minutes until she could go back upstairs.

Mira pushed the bowl an inch closer to the center of the counter. Not toward Wren. Toward where Wren would stand if she meant to stand at all.

Wren stood there.

The strawberries were too many. They had bought them at the market on Sunday because the woman who sold them had said something about the rain coming the next week and that this was the last weekend they would be good. Eleanor had been on the phone the whole time, in the kitchen back at the house, doing the thing she did now where she got smaller into the phone and tighter at the shoulders and would not say what Andrew had done, only that he had done it.

It was Tuesday. They had not talked about Eleanor since Sunday night.

This was the conversation they were not having and had not started having. Wren ate a strawberry. The skin was cold and the inside was warm where her palm had been around the bowl for a moment before she lifted it.

Mira said, “Eleanor called at nine.”

“While I was in the shower.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t say.”

“No.”

Wren waited.

“She said she was fine,” Mira said. “And then she said it again.”

Wren put the stem on the saucer that Mira had set out for the stems. There were three stems on the saucer already. Mira had been here for some time. Long enough to eat three strawberries. Long enough to have considered coming upstairs and waking her, and then not.

“You should have woken me.”

“I almost did.”

“Why didn’t you.”

Mira looked at her then. The look was the one Wren had been married to for thirty-one years.

“Because she said she was fine.”

Wren knew what she meant. Mira had stood in the kitchen at half past nine and decided the night could not hold the conversation. She had let Wren sleep.

Wren ate a second strawberry.

“All right,” she said.

She had known, at the second step on the stairs, that Mira would be in the kitchen. She had known, on the third step where the wood gave, that Mira would have something in her hands. She had known what the something would be when she saw the strawberries on the counter when she went up to bed at ten and Mira had not yet come up. She had known by the way Mira left the colander out. She had known when she came into the room that the door to the garden would be open, because Mira at this hour always wanted the smell of the leaves.

The way Mira put the bowl on the counter and the way Wren came down and stood in front of the bowl and the way the eating one strawberry then another then another at quarter past two on a Tuesday in June meant that they were holding the same thing between them without having to lift it.

After the fourth strawberry Mira said, “Come outside.”

“In what.”

“What you have on.”

Wren had on the thing she had had on in bed, which was very little. The night was warm.

They went out into the garden. The flagstone was warm too. They stood there for a while not saying anything. The neighbor’s cat came across the wall and looked at them and went back the way it had come.

“It will be all right,” Mira said, after a long time.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

“But you wanted to say it.”

“Yes.”

Wren turned and put her forehead against Mira’s shoulder. Mira’s hand came up to the back of her head, found the place behind her ear where the hair grew finer, stayed there. They stood like that for some minutes. Wren listened to Mira’s breathing under the cotton of her shirt and to the cars on the road far away and to the small sound of something moving in the rosemary.

They did not say anything else about Eleanor.

In the morning Eleanor would call again, and the conversation that they had not had at quarter past two would have to be had at quarter past eight, with coffee, with the day in front of them, with their voices clear and their hands free. They would handle it. Mira would say the thing she needed to say and Wren would answer her and they would not always agree. There would be the year of it, and possibly the years.

But the night was the night. And the strawberries were the strawberries. And the bowl was on the counter where Mira had put it for whichever of them came down first, and Wren had come down, and Mira had said the thing she had to say in the smallest version that the kitchen could hold, and Wren had taken it.

When they went back upstairs the bedroom had cooled. Mira pulled the sheet up over both of them. The window was still open. Somewhere a dog was barking very faintly.

Wren said, “Thank you.”

“For what.”

“For not waking me.”

“For not waking you.”

They slept.

the essay where i ran my own test on this one: the seam migrates.

if it stayed with you, write to me.