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garden with white canvas bags in a circle around her feet. Anton had met her on the street lugging home groceries, which he offered to carry. Walking past our house, they stopped for a rest, and Anton went inside to get her something to drink. The woman was grey all over—hair, skin, and clothes—with an innocent, if sorrowful, face. And whether by way of explanation or apology or simply introduction, she turned her head and repeated, or incanted, in a childlike way, “I told him my husband turned to stone. My husband, Malcolm, turned to stone, turned to stone, turned to stone.” And what I felt at that moment was neither bewilderment nor surprise, but an unsettling sense of déjà vu.
    Once, in a crowded department store at Christmastime, I was doing some last-minute shopping, sizing up a small kitchen appliance on a bottom shelf—a waffle iron, I think it was—the top of which was shaped like a toilet seat, and even lifted up like one. I was crouched down at a child’s height, with shopping bags all around my feet, when a toddler whose mother was also looking at something on the bottom shelf approached me cheerfully and held her small white bear up to my face. “Baby Ted,” she said, telling a childless and uncomprehending stranger, whom she had not yet been warned to avoid speaking to, about the emotional ties that bound her to the earth. They were perhaps the only two words she knew, but sometimes two words, even no words, are enough. Though the child and the old woman were a lifetime apart, on their faces there was the same look, set in their eyes like the warm light trapped in the amber eyes of the bear: an absolute assurance that this stranger understood.
    Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, was the clinical name, Anton informed me that evening. He’d gone straight to the library after walking her home.
    â€œBone, not stone,” he said. “Her husband turned to bone. The strangest disease they know. Muscle, ligament, and tendon become real bone, marrow too. A new skeleton comes around the old one. No one knows why, though the first case reported was in 1692. But then, why did Gregor Samsa turn into a hard-back insect? ‘What happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.’”

    After Anton had been here a couple of weeks, I had to call in Mrs. Somerton ahead of her time. She was still there in the afternoon when I got home from work, flat on her back on the chesterfield with her feet up on the cushions. Though she was a far cry from Anton, after more than a year of conscientious housecleaning, she had graduated to a certain level of informality around the place.
    â€œI’m sorry, my love,” she said, “but I had to lie down. I’m after cleaning it from top to bottom, but it took me all day.”
    I thought she was going to say because of the mess, but she said it was because of the pain in her side. Her hernia was acting up again.
    â€œI s’pose I’ll have to let him put me in after all,” she said. “Dr. Crowley’s been after me for the past five years. But, Sacred Heart, he wants me to go into St. Clare’s, and I’m frightened to death to go near that place. The bathrooms don’t even have sinks in there, and they had a case of that flesh-eating disease, I heard.”
    â€œNo, I don’t think it was that,” I said. “But it was some kind of strange bacteria they found,” I added, not too reassuringly.
    â€œWell, it was in the paper, my love, and whatever it was it don’t make you feel too safe. All the ones I sees comin’ out of there look even sicker than when they goes in.”

    No, I’ve never liked getting up in the middle of the night. My own body is starting to give trouble, like Mrs. Somerton’s. At what age does the prostate begin to tighten its grip? I thought it was in your fifties or sixties, not your forties. Why does urination take so long late at