She sees tiny little bubbles first, on the surface. Milk in a pan on the gas hob, being heated for hot chocolate. Outside sparks and sparklers and the crackle and spit of wet wood in flame. People drift in and bring the bonfire smell in their hair and she winces as they laugh. In the pan the bubbles coalesce, become a bubble collective before bursting to make room for new ones.

Her suitcase is still in the hall, where she left it. Dirty and battered with its sticky wheels, in it the socks and pants and other dirty things of her life. She has dragged it all across town, from the station, along the streets, under the subway, around the park to this house, this place on this night. Because there is nowhere else to be, not because she wants to be here.

Her sister passing by touches her lightly on the elbow. Sending connection and rejection through her neurons to where her thoughts should be. But she isn’t really thinking. Just watching the milk in the pan as it starts to simmer.

Back where she was, where the suitcase comes from, the place she left, is that man who was a boy once. She imagines he is sitting as she left him, slumped on the rug. Wet face, whimpering, smashing his fist on the floorboards. He didn’t have to do that.

Their life together had started as a dance, until it decelerated. One minute she was spinning and leaping, the next wading through mud. Looking at him and all the small daily betrayals of his face made her hate him in the end. Looking at him was like burning in her head.

The milk at the bottom is catching. The simmer is becoming a rolling boil. She turns away from the pan for a moment, wanting to be where the others are. Her feet won’t move, still clogged with mud. Her sister smiles and moves like silk around the guests, draping across them with a self-aware deftness that they admire and desire.

The man in the flat, the flat man, he made her feel full up and bursting with stuff to say that could never be said. “You’re fucking mad” he had said when she finally burst and all the words inside her vomited all over him. Her skin was itching, her eyes were dry as blades. Her sister called from the garden, with her sweet and singsong voice like an angel bitch. The milk in the pan was boiling, rising, near the top of the pan. It breached the sides and hissed as it ran into the gas flame.

Her sister’s fist gripped her wrist, pulled it back from the pan. Flame extinguished, milk subsided, bubbles dissipating, boiled and done. Nothing left but a dirty pan.