I’m sketching a house in fine black ink—a Carpenter Gothic with three steeply pitched gables and lace-like gingerbread vergeboard. It’s a yellow house with white trim, but you can’t tell that from the drawing.

In the yard there’s a tall, leafy tree. Probably maple. The porch is lined with hydrangeas that I imagine blooming hues of blush and blue, the petals and leaves merely lines in the shape of bushes.

In the foyer behind the French doors there’s a woman, most likely, tucking galoshes slicked with spring rain into a wooden cubby beneath the coat rack. She presses one hand to her stomach, bracing herself against the wall with the other. It’s nothing, she tells the teenaged daughter passing through from one room to the next.

Just go to the doctor already, the girl likely calls from the kitchen. The woman probably nods, continuing along toward the back staircase, knowing she won’t, that she lost coverage after that fucker left her.

At the counter, I imagine the girl cuts a thick slice of tomato and lets juice run onto the marble, tinged pink like a single bloom of blood in water. She lays the slice over glossy mayo on hearty seeded bread. Her teeth impart a perfect imprint in the layers—red, to white, to speckled fawn.

In all likelihood, the sandwich remains untouched, the pristine bitemark intact for days after the girl hears a body-sized clatter from the back of the house. When she returns after midnight, her father’s wheel-well-rusted Corolla idling in the street, she probably skips the kitchen entirely, probably cups her hands around her eyes like blinders as she rushes up the edge of the staircase to her room to pack a duffel.

Overnight, the sliced tomato develops a wrinkled skin, puckering around the edges from air exposure. After a week, it’s likely coated with a comforting layer of fuzz in greys and greens, but the impression is still visible.

Eventually, they come and empty the house out. Strangers probably wander from room to room, down the hall, up the staircase with ease. The girl doesn’t return, but she imagines each pot, each pan, each chair, each book, the once rain-slicked galoshes, floating out through the French doors and down the street of their own accord. She imagines the inside of the house bare, a sun-bleached ribcage picked clean.

But you can’t tell any of that from the drawing.