In honor of short story month, exquisite corpse fiction by MCD's writers

If you are unfamiliar with the Surrealist parlor game art form of the Exquisite Corpse*, MCD is offering you an introduction of sorts, as they’ve asked their writers to contribute daily bursts of fiction, each one in the sequence written without seeing the entirety of the previous entry. The idea (named the Exquisite Eel) is to create an accidental and arresting piece of fiction, non-sequiturs built one upon the other, all in honor of Short Story Month.

You can follow along here or here, and the very first entry is by the wonderful Lindsay Hunter, and ends like this:

Saturday she was herself again, outwardly; as a mother she could seem normal as long as there was toast, a cool, soothing hand when her boys looked for one, and as long as she didn’t stare too long or breathe too deeply.

What would you write next?

* For a brief and ridiculous time in college my friends and I were really into writing exquisite corpse stories, fancying ourselves neo-surrealist artistes, wearing gloves and not having enough sex.