Every night about this time I wake up and, trying not to wake Clarissa, I creep out of bed, take a piss, and go downstairs to the home office to log onto the Internet.
         I’m online every day for my job, but there’s something I can only do at this time, around 3:45 or 4:00 in the morning. The website isn’t there during the day. One time I didn’t bother going to sleep, just sat there til dawn, refreshing and refreshing my browser window, but that night it never showed up at all. I think it needs me to have been sleeping first.
         Then there it is: MySpace-style fonts, flashing ads, clumsy HTML frames. Every night, new dropdown menu options mixed in with previous ones:
         SEX STUFF
         HAUNTOLOGY
         JELLYFISH MIND
         THE LADY OR THE TIGER
         DE RERUM NATURA
         BASILISK
         YOLO FOMO BOGO GOAT
         HYBRID MOMENTS
         IPHIGENIA
         OKAY LOOK WHATEVER OKAY
         THY UNCREATING WORD
         I have to select one or nothing happens. I’ve tested that too, sitting here like a dummy all night long, until at some point between five and six am I blink and the page is gone. I’ve tried several dozen options over the last year and there are things I can tell you I never want to see again. And there are a few I’ve never had the balls to click on (no thank you, THY UNCREATING WORD). Last night, frustrated, I chose SEX STUFF, which is about what you’d expect. It’s seedy and kind of depressing, but it gets the job done. I just need to keep the volume down.
         But tonight I’m in a maudlin mood. Over dinner Clarissa had started crying. When I asked what was wrong she deflected: menopause stuff, nothing to worry about, just hormones. But I wondered, like I often do, if it wasn’t because it’s just the two of us now that our parents are gone, and that there isn’t any more family to speak of. Nights can be lonely with just the two of us. Days, too. So tonight I click on IPHIGENIA.
         She walks into the office, barefoot, in a white shift, long braided black hair trailing down her back. I hug her. She barely comes up to my ribcage. Daddy, she says, or rather, she says πατήρ but I know what it means. She says something that means, I’m scared, and I run my hand over her hair and coo.
         I know what the Internet wants me to do. I’m to lay her on the stone altar in the garden, which sits at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking the sea, none of which will be there in the morning, and offer her blood to Artemis. And then, so I’m told, favorable winds will blow for me, and all my designs will be enabled. But I’ve never done that. As always, I lay her down on the old sofa instead and hold her hand until she drifts off to sleep. Eventually I’ll doze off too and when I wake up she’ll be gone. One night I snuck upstairs and woke Clarissa and told her, quick, quick, there’s someone you need to see, but you can guess what happened. She was gone by the time we got to the office, and Clarissa was angry, she had a client meeting in the morning and needed to look presentable, not everyone has the privilege of working from home. Of course it had been a stupid idea.
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