"What does the boy want? Perhaps the boy wants milk?" she said hopefully. The phrase "the boy" continued to resound like something rapidly shuttled across a court somewhere, so that I felt I had been born into a dream. There were no hard edges in her world; everything was soft, mutable, assured. Even later when she told me about the divorce (giving in to an impulse of vindictiveness, she assured me that he had done the worst thing imaginable), it all seemed illusory and overblown, as if she were reciting from a melodrama, and one that, anyway, she didn't find particularly compelling. For the most part, she recounted faithfully and placidly, as if faintly surprised at what she had remembered, as if faintly surprised she could make sense of it all. Much had changed in the world before she wearied of her horrors and gave me leave to get up and dress myself. And I looked out the window at the castle, aware that it was here that materiality began; the world was created on this day, and it was not a place one would want to remain for long.