Out of a sound if light sleep to the cough of the trap snapping down on some small rodent skull. She curses and digs herself out of the bed, stumbles into the kitchen dry-throated and gummy-eyed.

Rich smell of newly turned soil. Her stools are knee-deep in humus, their cushions threaded through with blind white roots. She braces her feet against the wall and lifts the door shut, then is nearly buried by the rising loam, well-tilled by an orgy of worms.

She wades to the counter, to the pantry, the house creaking like an old ship under the new weight of loam. The trap has taken root, has split in bone-white shards of raw wood between the impatient cannular stretch of a mouse-brown sapling. Walnut shells and the sour seminal tang of ivy.

More roots have colonized the jamb of the patio door. They break melodic as lying harp strings when she throws herself against the lock, fruitful earth sucking at her thighs. Eager, greedy growth.

The door opens and the wood runs out in a chorus of pipes. The kitchen floor is avacado linoleum and black droppings, cold-blanched feet and a thimble’s worth of dying mouse.