When we went down to the basement one day with our realtor, he unfolded an old, blue plastic tarp, and out jumped a commune of black spiders. I said, “What are they?” He said, “Poisonous.” I said, “Should we kill them?” He said, “You could.” I have taken to wearing pink iridescent gardening clogs. Every step matters. We have taken to falling asleep at 10 and waking up at 4. We are learning about the house after the fact, the way I have learned about every relationship I have ever been in. In the basement, I picked up a circular metal thing I guessed served an electrical purpose and felt a sudden jolt of pain in the pillow of my thumb so surprising I didn’t know what kind of pain it was or what had caused it. I dropped the thing on the metal table I had picked it up from and walked away. Then something clicked below consciousness and I walked back. It couldn’t have been a shock, so it must have been a sting or a bite, and sure enough when I inspected the metal thing again, the head of a wasp or hornet peeked out. The insect was indolent, one of those bugs past flying that scuttles along improbably on a cement floor. I hit it several times with the thing it had been living in because I was angry and afraid, and a few moments later saw myself as witless and cruel. The sting did not hurt very much. Everyone who looked at the house before us was stopped by the serial killer aspect of the basement with its corroded metal shelves, duct tape remedies, and decades of mounded dirt. The first thing I thought when I saw the tragic carelessness of the banged out wall between the two basements, the bloody, chipped-tooth, broken mouth aspect of the hole in the wall was, I can make it beautiful. I was thinking the other day, Any man with a sexy mouth is going to have a better life. I was thinking there are no good endings. All endings are bad. That is why it is difficult to end a story. You have to stop before the end, because the end is always bad. The standard ideas about endings–just no. Arrival, no. Death, no. Marriage, no. A baby, no. Love gained, no. Knowledge acquired, no. Today I bought a cotton mop and two pails and Pine Sol.