Elaine’s internal monologue raged on in a string of obscenities and insults as she stood in the cold outside Kay’s door, tapping her foot in impatience that fueled her anger in a satisfying way.

Her sharp eyes searched the ground around his stoop as she listened to the sounds of him stumbling towards the door, disgruntled to find that there were no cigarette butts she could reproach him for in the midst of the tirade she was preparing, and then locked onto his face as he cracked the door to gaze at her blearily, shivering in his threadbare T-shirt and boxers.

“What time is it?” he asked, voice fuzzy when he stepped aside slightly to let her in, his confused eyes going from her to the still-dark sky and back to her, fumbling for the phone that wasn’t in his pocket. “Who’s dying?”

She narrowly avoided slamming the door behind her, remembering that he had neighbors, and that walls were very thin.

“You, if you don’t get your s**t together,” she hissed, giving him a shove to the chest.

He allowed himself - more from astonishment than an inability to resist - to be repeatedly pushed backwards as she continued to rail at him in a whisper.

“You lying sack of garbage. I ought to have your guts for Christmas decorations. You sad excuse for a -”

“Whoa, whoa,” he protested, instinctively keeping his own voice low and attempting to shield himself from her blows as he was pushed all the way back into his bed. “What did I do? Is this about Maus - did you hear some sort of - for Christ’s sake, don’t you normally charge for this?” he yelped, as she grabbed his arm and gave him a shake.

“Don’t joke with me, you snide little rat,” she hissed, reaching down to pull off her shoe - a fuzzy slide, despite the weather, because she would not succumb to closed toes until it was a health hazard to do otherwise - and beginning to thwack him solidly on whatever flesh presented itself.

“What the - ow, ******** - I will yell - I have neighbors -”

“Do it and die, Pinocchio,” she spat. “What’s the sob story you gave her, huh? Because it can’t be the same one you’re about to give me. She’s lucky she didn’t get to know the real you, you stupid - b*****d -” she punctuated each word with an especially hard blow of the shoe, which was - fortunately for him and unfortunately for her - made of a light sort of rubber beneath the marabou, and not doing much damage. “Has she not dealt with enough without having to come afoul of your bullshit? Why don’t you take all the time you could have been spending lying to girls on Tinder and getting your -”

“Whoa, whoa,” he repeated, scrambling free of the rain of blows and cowering in the corner of his bed, one arm still lifted to shield himself. He looked, it must be said, especially pathetic, even his mustache disheveled, in his sleeping clothes, surrounded by the slightly stale nest of his bed, bathed in the flickering light of a muted TV screen streaming some sort of YouTube SpongeBob clip compilation. “Mel? She a friend of yours? I wouldn’t have, if I’d known -”

“So you could do it to someone else?” she exploded (quietly). She brandished the shoe threateningly. “Look at this ******** pigsty,” she added, although in truth it wasn’t as bad as she might have expected. She kicked a beer can by the bed. “Clean this up.”

He scrambled to obey without really thinking about it, flinching away from a final smack to the arm delivered with an irate energy, after which she put her shoe back on (much to his relief).

“I think I might puke,” he said, somewhat pathetically, and although he did look genuinely ill, she only gave him a withering stare.

“Not if you know what’s good for you. Are you hungover?”

“Or still drunk, I don’t know,” he said, sullenly picking up a can in one hand to shove it into a plastic bag containing the remnants of his dinner, the other hand massaging his arm. <********,” she said, with a little stomp of her foot as she perched on the edge of his bed in a way entirely too queenly to fit the situation, her arms folded as she supervised. She nudged an empty bottle in his direction with her toe. “It’s a ******** weekday.”

“Not all of us work a Monday to Friday,” he said, unable to avoid adding: “I mean, look at you.”

“Finish that thought,” she said, her voice full of danger as she half-reached for her shoe again. He did not.

“She told me she had a good time!” he protested once he was out of arm’s length - not that there was much room to dodge her in the tiny studio he called home.

“Before or after you told her it was all a lie?”

“Does it matter? A good time’s a good time.”

“You either don’t actually believe that or you’re stupider than I gave you credit for.”

“I guess I’m ******** stupid, then,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made a difference to me.”

“That’s because you’re - a shallow ******** - pig of a -”

“I didn’t even try to go in for a kiss! All I did was treat her to dinner and a good conversation!”

“And get her hopes up that she’d finally met a normal, non-shitty man who could afford to buy her a glass of wine every now and then only to dash it against a ******** rock after you’d already entertained yourself at her expense!” she hissed.

“She didn’t pay -”

“Not that expense, you idiot!”

He experimentally swirled a bottle in his hand, sniffed it, and then downed what was left in the bottom before shoving it into the bag, which was growing full. He tied it off and gave her a look of sudden expressive mournfulness. “Does it help if I say I felt bad about it?”

“No! Firstly because I don’t believe you and secondly because if I did I’d just be even more disgusted you did it anyway.”

“It’s not like she can believe anyone is who they say they are anyway,” he said. “If I’d met her six months ago I might have been as honest as it’s possible and if she had the bad taste to like me anyway she’d have ended up texting heart emojis to a ******** agent of -”

“Shut up,” she said sharply. “Is that your excuse?”

“Maybe she is an agent of -”

“Shut up,” she repeated.

“I don’t even know how to be myself anyway. I don’t even know who myself ******** is,” he said bitterly.

“Don’t use that as an excuse to make it someone else’s problem,” she said coldly, rising. “Take that ******** bag with you, we’re going to the dumpster so it doesn’t just sit in your floor for another two weeks.”

He struggled into a coat and shoes, and she gave him a disgusted look. “What?”

“Chicken legs,” she said, and it was with visible effort that he managed to avoid rolling his eyes as they walked out into the cold parking lot, he being shunted along before her with frequent proddings of her finger in his arm.

He was not dressed for the cold, which made it worse when a snowball abruptly slammed into his cheek. Elaine danced back out of range, already looking for the assailant, but no one seemed to be there. Another followed, and then a third, and he yelped.

“Are you doing this?” he demanded.

“No,” she said, infuriatingly untouched three feet away. “It’s just more - Destiny City Bullshit -”

Pummeled by snowballs, he made an undignified scurry towards the dumpster, trying to speak to her as he did so, his feet sliding on the slippery concrete.

“Well what am I supposed - ow - to do about - Christ - the whole thing? I can’t just - for ******** sake - sit at home by myself and -”

“You damn well can, if the alternative is lying to people for the hell of it,” she said, looking untouched by the cold despite her own bare legs, which had no resemblance to a chicken’s.

“You go out, don’t you? You’re always - ow - talking about going on dates with every ******** man in a fifty mile - ouch!”

This one, maybe, had been thrown by Elaine. She glared at him, rubbing her hands as if they were freezing.

“Anyway, you do all that - and you’re lying, aren’t you? Because none of them - Jesus - know about -”

He slammed the bag into the dumpster, and the rain of snowballs abruptly ceased. He stood warily still and silent, and then began brushing snow off his sleeves, somewhat shakily, as he scuttled back towards his door, Elaine following in stately dignity and - surprisingly - without speaking.

In the comparative warmth within, he shook snow from his hair, shedding his coat - and hanging it up on the door when she glared at him - and creeping back towards his bed, which he crawled into shivering.

“I don’t lie about who I am,” she said coldly, after a long pause. “I tell them I’m Elaine, because I am. Nothing changes that.”

He was silent, trying to wrap himself up in mismatched blankets, and maybe he thought that the cold would pardon the pathetic little sniff that escaped him. “Kay isn’t even real,” he said, childish.

“Make him real, then,” she said impatiently. “And until you do, don’t think you have the right to ensnare everyone else in inventing everyone that he isn’t.”

He sat in the cold, and the flickering TV light illuminated suspiciously bright eyes. “I still think I might puke,” he said at last.

“Wait til I’m gone, then,” she said, but she couldn’t help it that some part of her softened, watching him break against the idea of having no name to call his own. It was, at least, a source of contention that she could sympathize with of late.

“You could speed it up by going now,” he pointed out.

She stood for a moment in silence. “If you reach out to her again I will make you regret it. Or I’ll make Maus regret it, if you don’t exist enough to have any kind of regrets.”

“Mean ******** thing you said just now,” he observed listlessly.

“I know. You deserved it. Figure your s**t out,” she repeated, turning towards the door. “And don’t make it anyone else’s problem, or I’ll make it mine.”

She was gone, then, leaving him to the silent misery of something he rarely felt - a guilty conscience. He raged against it inwardly, accusing it of unfairness, holding up his own tribulations as evidence that he was justified, and still it asserted itself, unmoved.

“I don’t feel bad about it,” he whispered to himself, angrily. “She had a good time. She told me so.”

A snowball slammed into his window, startling him, and he gazed warily at the glass.

“Fine,” he said at last, to no one and nothing in particular - or maybe, in some strange way, to a self that didn’t feel real.