off the rack

Then came routine. My father drove Daphne and Sara to school on his way to work. I slept until noon, then got up and drank tea for hours. It was late November and light moved from room to room with the active silence of a live thing. The cat lifted her head and blinked the deep black slits, the active green of her eyes. I paced from light to shadow, feeling my way back into the fleshy place I'd torn myself from. When I got there, I'd sit in the dining room and study for the GED with the TV on the rerun channel, volume off. I used to watch these shows with my family. The black-and-white people were so full of memory and feeling that they were like pieces of ourselves, stopped in a moment and repeating it again and again, until it became an electronic shadow of a fleshy place. Sunlight ran over the table and onto the floor. I've touched you all day, it said, and now I have to go.

from the novel veronica by mary gaitskill