When the television set flickers, and the music breaks into a crescendo, Leslie grips the sofa cushion, looks around the house. The Women We Want to Be channel is running a Man in My Closet marathon, and Leslie doesn’t want to miss one episode. Men hide in the crawl spaces, the closet, the basement, behind the full-length mirror. They take notes about the women they watch, fantasize about wearing their faces as masks. The show has Leslie’s pulse running. There must be so many hiding places. So many places to check.

In the morning, she inspects the crawl space, gets down low, slides along the cobwebs. Dirt settles in her throat, her lungs, but she finds no one.

In the morning, when she looks in the mirror, her eye has dislodged from its socket. She inhales, pushes it back in, then feels something press back, something strong. She turns away from the mirror, turns back, shuts off the light, switches it back on—and then dares to look in the mirror again.

Her head is like an attic, revealing a cut-away view—where an intruder, fully shaped in human form, but smaller, has crawled inside. It taunts her, puckering its lips in a kiss. It screams at her to roam the neighborhood at night, get into the crawlspaces, and let it out. The screaming, and the resulting headaches, are enough to make her move.

She hides inside the first house she sees down the street, and when she lets this thing out, she gathers her courage. With a needle and thread, she sews that thing inside her pocket, until she can get home and build walls in her yard. She fastens those walls with locks, her vision growing stronger. Within the walls, she places the intruder and kisses it goodbye.