Stanley winces at a few of Mosely’s shrieking giggles coming in from the living room, so that his one long, curlicue of thick black hair swoops from left to right across his forehead, wiggles a little bit. Erin likes this about him. She looks up at Stanley. She doesn’t know what she is saying until she starts: “I feel, kind of, like, stupid, saying this to you.” She looks at the ground after breaking eye contact; the vinyl floor is curling at the edges underneath every appliance, at every entrance way. The refrigerator has pictures of Mosely on it, from when he was younger: one of him on his softball team, the Manchester Maulers: one of him, Stanley, and Stanley’s father on a fishing trip to Lake Eerie, when Mosely caught a 4-pound small-mouth bass and his grandfather had apparently said to the little Mosely, dressed in his squeaky yellow rain boots, “Already more of a man than ol’ Stan here!”: there’s one of him and Erin on the first day of kindergarten, taken by Stanley: one of Mosely right after he was born: his first halloween, first leaf-pile, first christmas, first snow fall, first easter, and, her favorite, his first time playing in the mud. The black refrigerator was clogged with all sorts of photographs and newsletters and news clippings and drawings and lists, so much, so much. And to think, Erin thinks, that soon all of the lists on the fridge would be different, and the photographs would change, and the news clippings would become outdated and be thrown away, and that Mosely would be growing up soon, too quick for her, or even a magnetic fridge, or a digital camera, to keep track of. She feels excited, and nervous, but mostly pissed. Her eyes rest on Stanley. It isn’t his fault. She wants to think it is, though. She wants to blame everything on his not leaving this alone: she would have much more energy to deal with all the other bullshit if he wasn’t zapping her reserves all with his nagging. She looks at the spackled ceiling, then around the kitchen again, where everything is either white or light brown. She has to make sure the Comcast bill went through. Fuck! And Stanley still hasn’t tightened those cabinets. She wants to get rid of it all, right now, impulsively: scrap it and start fresh. But this is an apartment; there isn’t much they can do in terms of re-structuring or re-modelling. All they can do is put up pictures and paintings everywhere and cover up all the mistakes: but neither the paintings that are hung nor the pictures they have taken are brightly colored enough; everything is a dulled down in this tiny space, everything except for this single painting that came with the apartment. Erin hates it. Hates this painting with everything in her. It scares her, for some reason. It’s an odd painting that she kept because Mosely had liked it, and because deep down she had felt some obligation to keep the only painting that had been here, waiting for her, before her. The frame is, maybe, 18”x18”. It is dated 1956, has no title, and the only other writing on it is, “Djandjan, 1956”. Basically, the subject is a spiral descending down into nothing: the outer circle of which was nearly touching the edges of the frame. The spiral was painted in a sort of cotton-candy-pink, and outlined in what might possibly have been a black fine point sharpie. That was it. Erin shivers, looking at the painting: illuminated in the slanted earl-grey Manchester cloud-light. The painting’s background is bright orange, kept slightly at bay behind the surface’s thin, dull, pastel aura. Erin wants to call it a fucking piece of shit painting; but the truth is, she can’t find out, or can’t articulate, exactly what is wrong with it. The painting itself is way too simple for anyone to miss anything that was actually there. Why make a painting like that at all? thought Erin. At points during her time in this apartment, she had convinced herself it was just a giant joke: that someone had either made this painting ironically, or found it at a flea market, or that it just came with the place and everyone who’d lived here was just too nervous or lazy to throw it out. But nothing about it seems like it's trying to be ironic: she could see there was a good amount of time put into it — making sure the sharpie didn't squiggle, or that the circle stayed inside the square. And it had a sort of youthfulness to it: a glow. Regardless: something about how close the edges of the circle came to the edges of the canvas just gave her the friggin’ willies. This stupid circle that Erin hates, has always hated, but doesn’t have the bravery to get rid of: and is now staring at, unsure of where she was going with her words.