A married mother in her 40s living in California thinks about her own paranoia and how her husband hasn't had sex with her for 8 months. She would ask him to check her for ticks, just so he would touch her, even though there wasn't Lyme in CA. She thinks about how men believe they are special because they're told they are and believe that their sexual desire is more fervent and painful. She recently has begun to feel a burning female sexual desire she never felt when she was younger. She lies in bed imagining different reasons for them not having sex: that she's just imagining him there and he never came back after she kicked him out after a fight awhile ago, that he's gay, that he's molesting their children, that she's not attractive to him, or, most likely, that he's having an affair.

She feels angered by the "plague of perfectionism on parenting blogs." She thinks about how having a children engulfed her identity. She tries to write a mothering manual and ends up with two sentences: “Hormones are life. hormones are mental illness“ and "Equality between the sexes does not exist.”

A few days prior, her husband emailed her a list of life hacks and she responded,  “Or you could marry a woman and make her your slave.”

She often wakes her husband, Sam, in the night. Once, she told him she was dying and he went back to bed. Another time, she said, “I want you to agree that there is more than one reality.” He went back to sleep without listening or agreeing.

She used to be a drug dealer and people still come to her to buy pot, even though it's legal now. The other drug dealers, all 20-year-olds, ask her to join them at a bar one night. One of their friends sits down with her and she's excited at the prospect of him flirting with her and imagines having sex with him, but he just asks if she has snacks, because she's a mom and he's hungry.

She asks Sam to check her for ticks and offers to do him, but he just goes to sleep.

She hears a man coughing outside and sends Sam to go check. She lies in bed in the dark imagining Sam's death, wondering what she would be without him. She calls for him and he's not there. She imagines he is probably safe, watching porn, but fears the worst.

She imagines all the different women she becomes in the dark and welcomes them all in. She remembers trying to be friends with a famous author who lived in a nearby house but was disgusted by pregnancy and motherhood. She remembers overhearing an older woman voicing her insecurities into her phone on a bus and hating the second-hand embarrassment. She remembers an academic she vaguely knew having an affair with a grad student with his wife's permission, and the grad student embarrassing herself at a party, yelling: “You’re just angry because of what I do with my queer vagina.” She thinks about language and how it has transformed and the mundanity of the body.

Worried about Sam, she crawls out of bed to investigate and finds that Sam is, actually, the man coughing outside, locked out of the house from when she had kicked him out and changed all the locks. He says he wants to come home and be with his family. She makes him agree to understand that she's a complicated individual. She says, “I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.” She lets him in, and they leave the door wide open.