Claire's subcranial wasp storm began gradually. After it began she had whole periods of perfect clarity and relief so she didn't notice the buzzing and burning that went on under her skull.

Her life went on in her kitchen with its steamy respirating heat and inside the kitchen at the restaurant she worked in with its clattering, sloshing bustle. It went on in the delicate, heaving love she felt toward her son.

One day she was driving home from work. Over her, the white day moon was as perfect as a discarded fingernail or the arches of Daryl's soft feet or the thick crowd of stars she saw out of her car window when she was seventeen and driving to the airport. As perfect as water. The moon was as perfect as her ex-husband's perfect, butter colored back.

She tried to reconcile the sometimes radiant clarity of her life with the sometimes shattered discord of her inside wasp storm and by the light of the pure day moon she saw that she would never be able to weld the two parts of her life together. Days would be disconnected from each other and she would not be able to count the losses of the people and memories that would fall into that gap between her bright life and her wasp life.