An old man wearing a jellaba is half-asleep in his chair, on his lap a copper plate of cakes dripping with honey. Using a sheet of newspaper, he holds out a honey-almond briouat that has been dipped scalding hot into boiling honey. Tomorrow, there will be a griouch made with sesame, saffron or orange blossom. Another time, there will be a sugar crescent cookie or a butter ghoriba. A few dirham change hands. He places the money in his turban.

I buy new expensive area rugs from Ikea and wait until Ivan’s stomach flu has run its course, and begin tearing up the old carpets I bought from Ollie’s Discount Outlet, quickly realizing that the entertainment center and television that my ex-boyfriend and his brother slowly shifted into the living room when we moved in are too heavy for me to get one of the carpet slabs completely out from under it.

Right from the jar with a fork I suck, beet juice dripping. I’m desperate for redness, want it on my tongue, inside me, outside me, paint for my warrior face, for my warrior place, addicted to those blood red days, drunk with missing those blood red days.

“All meals should be breakfast,” the Dark See proclaimed, squirting an avalanche of ketchup across her Devil With a Blue Dress omelette. She cut a violent swath through her meal. Chewing, the Dark See pointed out the window with her fork. “You see that guy across the street?” she said through a mouthful of egg, “The one dressed like a rockabilly Roy Orbison? He used to be a trick.”

It’s a warm day in late May, just perfect, and I’m as hopeful about this outing as I am desperate: the two of them, the three of us, we’ve always squabbled. Wrangled is probably a better word. Over the decades there have been huge eruptions, and long, siege-like silences, along with a great deal of routine sniping, and, though peace has occurred, it’s not the norm.