After you’re gone, I dream all the dresser and cupboard drawers yank themselves open in ransacked lack.

Closet doors swing ajar and clothes slump from their hangers with a sigh. Buttons unravel from their thread and are spat out—clattering to hardwood in a noisy scatter. I creep on the floor among them, eyes closed, trying to read their shifting Braille with my fingertips.

Hidden compartments come undone, popping out like jack-in-the-boxes around light fixtures and electrical sockets. The cats use them as cat doors, stepping in and out, in and out. I can hear them swish their tails inside the drywall.

The apartment now a Japanese puzzle box like the kind I played with as a child. An entire bedroom wall slides away with a brittle warble of tambourine bells, and I find a secret room. Inside, an inventory of lost things: my American grandmother's glittery blue metal music box, kokeishi dolls fishing on a geta shoe, unpaired earrings, black-and-white photos with yellowed scalloped edges, an entire language I used to speak. There are heavy flecked rice-paper boxes that smell like green tea, wrapped in simple bands of linen ribbon, stacked floor to ceiling. They are carefully labeled:

Things Forgotten When Not Written Down Inviolabilities Violated Dreams Really Nightmares and Nightmares Really Dreams Inappropriate and/or Transitional Love Objects Things Given Away Too Carelessly Moments Spent Too Long in Hesitation Moments of Not Enough Hesitation Awful Things Time I Thought I Had But Didn’t Snakeskinned Selves Unrealized Beauty

On the floor, in the middle of the secret room, a violin case. My violin. From before.

Mounted insects unhinge from the wall and ricochet about the apartment: blue morpho’s shiny awkward flapping; stick insect a slow-motion twig laboriously creeping away from the hearth; peanut-headed lantern fly making demented rotations around the crenellations of the mantelpiece before becoming a tangled seed-pod rattle in my hair.

Kneeling, I unlatch the case, expecting to see familiar burnished deep-red wood, to stroke hourglass curves, ebony fingerboard—tracing my finger over the bridge and along the graceful arabesques of the f-holes. But when I open the lid, I discover my violin is gone. Stolen.

Someone has left a note inside the empty velvet of the case. An anxious gust of wind rises and outside, chimes jangle their deranged music, walls of the room suddenly transparent—now liquid, breathing, a molten glass. Winged things buzz and swarm like the inside of a swirling snow globe. And when I lean in closer to read the handwriting—is it yours?—the note erupts into honey-colored flame.