A woman and her grown son are leaving their home. It’s time for bed, but the boy insists they play his favourite game one last time. Begrudgingly, the mother agrees. They make up ways of killing an unnamed woman. When the game is over, the boy asks what would happen if they killed the woman “for real,” if it would make his father love them again. We discover the woman in the game is real; someone the father has gotten involved with. At first, the mother insists that her son go to sleep, but her thoughts trail off. What if they really did kill her?

Disjunct eighth-note patterns in the upper register of the piano lay the foundation for a bedtime talk between mother and son. Under a mechanical, fragmented rhythm in the piano, their brief, conversational phrases grow increasingly wild as they imagine ways of killing a woman who they feel has wronged them. Later in the scene, the eighth-note pulse returns in a softer, more melancholic form, as both characters long for the peaceful family life of their past.