I’m stumbling through a dream of foggy reaching hands and doors that won’t open and shadows on clouds when I hear the barking. Torrents of it. Sudden and intense and approaching. I sit bolt upright in the unfamiliar darkness, clutching the sheets to my chin, feeling my heart flutter against ribs. The barking intensifies. I glance around wildly. Glowing green digits tell me it’s an insanely small hour of the night.

Tijuana. I’m in a tiny cinderblock house in Tijuana. With Nick. He’s a snore droning through the thin door.

I have to reach down toward the alarm clock shining on the bare concrete floor, since I don’t have a nightstand yet. My hand knocks over books and an empty Aquafina bottle, until it finally closes around the flashlight. Then I slide from my new twin bed and stand at the window, aiming the beam through the interior blinds and exterior bars. The racket is almost deafening, as if wild dogs are swarming our front yard, but I can’t see anything. The cone of light plays across the Explorer and empty pavers.

Then silence. Or as much silence as you ever get living this close to the border fence. Helicopters are whupping back and forth overhead, Humvees are revving around.

The local dogs were probably chasing some of the wetbacks who muster in the neighborhood for a midnight crossing. Or so I guess, clicking off the flashlight and returning to bed.

Sleep is a warm black tar sucking me in. I don’t stir again until hands are clapping, insistent and close. “Wake up. Hey. Nooshin. Wake up.” Nick is standing in the doorway, watching me with eyes like frozen propane fires. He’s fully dressed in jeans and an untucked oxford with the shirtsleeves rolled up. “You gotta come see this.”

I trail him out of the claustrophobic bedroom, pausing only to shrug into my new robe, rubbing sleepdust from my eyes. His broad shoulders squeeze into the false dawn and follow the periphery of the house. Behind him I’m tiptoeing carefully, barefoot, dodging rocks and broken glass.

He stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Our first visitor,” he announces, pointing at a motionless furry shape in the trash-littered yard.

A dead cat.

I haven’t seen any cats in Tijuana. Plenty of dogs, feral and roaming the streets, but no cats. Maybe this is why.

Nick moves forward with a shovel in one hand.

“What are you doing?” I ask plaintively, trying not to look at the dead cat. Its milky eyes. The ugly spilling gash in its side, where things had feasted. All the rusty stains around its muzzle from life leaking out.

“I need to get this thing into the trash,” he says.

I stop him with an extended fist and palm. “Rock scissors paper.”

“What?”

“Rock scissors paper. For whoever has to clean this up. It’s only fair.”

Nick waves me off. “You’re already the boss of everything indoors. This is my responsibility.”

“I’m the boss of everything indoors? What gives you that idea?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” He starts to slide the shovel under the cat, causing a slimy gray coil to ooze out.

My vision turns watery with tears, but I jab at him with my fist and palm. “Rock scissors paper.”

“Fine. Have it your way.” Nick sighs heavily and plants the shovel blade-edge into the ground. “Rock scissors paper.” Then he makes a fist and palm and thrusts it at me.

We smack our fists into our palms in counting gestures. One…two…three…

I make my hand flat. Paper.

Nick’s hand is in the shape of a — rock? I could’ve sworn it was scissors. “Go back inside, Nooshin. Get some sleep.” He plucks up the shovel and turns to our first visitor, but not before I glimpse him smirking in triumph.

That’s how I find myself at the kitchen window, huddled in my new robe, crying a little. I’m watching a man shovel a dead cat into the garbage can. A man who cheats at rock-scissors-paper in secretive compassion, and put me in charge of digitizing an archive, and offered shelter when I had nowhere else to go. A man I didn’t even know two months ago, when I fled my husband for the first time. And in this moment, as dawn spills over the neighborhood like pink lemonade, I have to force myself to stop thinking about Nick — stop feeling these emotions, stop fantasizing — and go back to bed.