(excerpt)

The maggots spilled out into the small frying pan from the shell she’d cracked on its edge. Her hand flew to her mouth, but then she pulled it away quickly, in case one had stuck to her finger. It hadn’t. She brushed both hands against her bathrobe and shivered in the unlit kitchen. On the stove, the translucent mass heaved sluggishly in the tepid grease, like joke vomit—a gag Ed would appreciate. She could smell the early morning cigarette he routinely hid from her, puffing out the bathroom window. She blinked and turned off the flame with hands barely shaking. The mass separated into amputated worms—slow moving, zombified turds that she imagined eating, licking off her lips. Or feeding to Ed on toast.

“Breakfast is ready,” she called.

But he had soundlessly entered the kitchen and was standing behind her—over her really—staring at the stove. She knew, without turning her head, that he was barefoot, which would only make his chilblains worse. Imagine: such a tiny house so hard to heat, at least on a nurses’ aid’s budget. He stood staring at the swollen curled sacs softly pulsing in the pan.

“It was the last egg, “she said.

“That,” he said softly behind her, “is so cool.”

“Cool unlike the fridge,” she said. “Which won’t fix itself.”

She turned to look at him. He’d shaved, but not well.

“Your nose needs blowing,” she said, because seventeen or not, boys need their mothers to tell it to them straight.

The boy wiped at his nose slowly with his sleeve and continued to stare down at the milky pellets in the pan. He was half dressed for school in a rumpled shirt hanging over grey trousers and there were dark shadows under both eyes. He tucked a tendril of bottle-black hair behind his ears and again, she wondered where he’d been last night. With mates whose exotic-sounding names he occasionally mentioned—Hai Chen, Ashley, Ilja—but whom she knew only as jarring ring-tones on his cell phone.

He reached across and took the pan by the wobbly handle, leaving a stray maggot on the stove. She didn’t know how to kill it, or even if it would die. Was it alive? It lay there like a severed limb.

She watched him take the pan past the kitchen table, still littered with her homework from last night. Their tea stood cooling in two mismatched cups. He walked through the screen door and onto the small concrete patio. She could see him through the torn screen, placing the pan carefully beside an upturned milk crate. He folded himself down onto the crate like an unkempt preying mantis, and stared at the maggots. She followed, keeping a wary eye on the pan. Suddenly one of the maggots flopped out onto the concrete and lay there, stricken. The soft blue sky was streaked with white, pink at the edges. She could hear the kegs being rolled off the truck down at the corner and the workmen baying to each other.

The escaped maggot had made its way onto Ed’s bare foot. His fallen arches were blue-ish in the cold, and the toes were as bleached and misshapen as small dead animals. She wondered what time it was.

“I could make you a piece of toast,” she said, doubtfully.…