A task.

A smell to be managed and a marble tub to be protected.

And because I did not see a person, I felt free to speak to her however I liked, the way you might speak roughly to a stain you were scrubbing.

This, I have come to believe, is how ordinary people do cruel things — not through malice, most of the time, but through this failure of sight, this quiet refusal to grant the full humanity of the person in front of us.

The cruel word costs us nothing when we have already decided, somewhere below thought, that the person hearing it does not fully count.