AT FIVE IN THE MORNING I MADE A cake. The tester came out clean. Actually there was a glint of moisture at the tip of the stick, but the rim of the cake had almost caught and I didn’t feel like tenting it with foil. The folding and fussing, the crunch-wobble sounds; it was all too much at that hour. Better a little underbaked than over, I thought.
By sunrise, the cake had cratered.
“Electricity doesn’t work that way,” my landlord said. We were looking up into the black emptiness where the lightbulb in my foyer had been. “You were never in any danger, even while it was happening.”
“And you’re not worried about mold?”
“It’s an old house. They were built to withstand a bit of damp.”
He left without closing the door behind him. The shoe mat squished as I shifted my weight from one bare foot to the other. For the past six months I have bathed every night with my right
