The husband had been eyeing the IKEA playmat with the buildings and the streets for a long time, and, because they never really went out of stock, he dwelled on the choice for awhile. Finally, as the world fell apart, the two of them hitched a ride back with the playmat in tow. It was not a particularly beautiful mat, but he was proud of it, and he put it out in the second bedroom of the flat, which they had already taken to calling the girl's room. There was no bed, no set of drawers; only a few folded cardboard boxes stacked up next to the pink coils of raffia string. Truth be told, there would not be a baby either, not for a long time, but they did not know it yet.

It was enough to be occupied with. He said he loved the texture of it. The wife, skeptical, soon acknowledged that the felted grass was pleasantly forgiving to the skin of the toes, and did not scratch too much unlike other kinds of cheap polyester that she remembered in her youth. They were both sensitive to textures like that, and each understood the other perfectly. One could imagine soft baby skin rolling around on it. The streets, too, were made of a shorter, stiffer fuzz that produced a bristly resistance which somehow did not seem to catch dust, which would be pleasant for the child if she were not asthmatic. In these clean streets the husband soon added some plastic trees, a few red cars. They would play cards on the mat in the evenings, cross-legged, under the light of a camping lantern.

The flat was not very large. As the wife pored over homework in the dining room which adjoined the kitchen and the master bedroom by a partition, it pleased her to see the triangle of deep green plush peeking out from the corner of the door. The little trees and red cars cast shadows into the room, across the workshop, the houses, the hospital, the school, the salon. The rest of the room was in shade. Finding work at an impasse, she ventured in, feeling for the light, noticing as if for the first time the expanse of the room which could not contain something so wonderful as a town. Getting on her hands and knees, she stretched out on the carpet. The fuzz of the grass gave way to that of the street, which was still warm from sunset, the memory of a day. She laughed, forgetting for a moment herself. Such little trees, such little cars.