There is a stirring in her chest, a shade of nervous anticipation with a touch of dread. In less than 20 minutes, he will occupy the adjacent seat, fill the car with his scent of leather and spicy cologne. Unless he doesn’t wear such things anymore. Details change in 10 years.

Her long hair, once black, has been recently invaded by thin white strands. She welcomes them.

She, people have said, is aging well. The wrinkles around her eyes are like the soft folds of a sand dune and the two grooves that run from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth are slight and shallow. Her long hair, once black, has been recently invaded by thin white strands. She welcomes them. Grey hair makes her look distinguished, especially swept high in a ponytail as it is today. She has applied a subtle layer of teal along her bottom eyelids, sending her green irises popping, and a quick swipe of black mascara heightens the effect, making the whites of her eyes appear polished. She’s been faithful with antioxidants and shea butter moisturizers over the years and maintains a healthy, near-vegetarian diet. She hasn’t let herself go the way some of her friends have done, with their wide pear-bums and bulbous bosoms. It can happen easily–even a couple of weeks of overeating can take its toll on someone her age.

She rolls into his gravel driveway and waits with the engine idling. He appears at the front door and glances casually at his watch as he approaches, letting her know he knows she is late. Old irritation flares inside her like an ulcer.

He opens the door and slides into the passenger seat.

“Hi!” he says cheerfully.

“Hi,” she replies, waits for him to close the door, then puts the car in reverse. He smells different, sporty, like teenage basketball players.

“Thank you for agreeing to do this,” he says. “The only decent lawyers are in the city and I found one that’s half the price of all the others. He’s legitimate, though. I looked him up. He only does divorces.”

She recoils at the term. It rings of failure with dissonant overtones of hardship and pain. Tell someone you’re separated and their eyes ignite with optimism. They’ll say something encouraging like, ‘Well, I’m sure it will work itself out.’ Tell them you’re divorced and their gaze clouds over–another divorce.

“Like I said, I’ll pay for it. The gas too,” he says, shifting his body as he pushes his shoes off with his feet.

“You have money?”

“What the hell does that mean?” His head snaps in her direction.

“I just mean, you don’t have to. Pay. We can split the cost.”

“No no. My business is doing great, and Julie is a successful career woman.” She feels her face flicker. Was that a jab at her art? He takes off his coat, leather, but not the black one he had for the years they were together. This one is brown suede.

“What does she do again?”

“Colonoscopies.”

“Is that how you guys met?” A grin creeps across her mouth, which she conceals by licking her lips and checking her blind spot as she merges onto the highway.

“None of your business.”

She can see from the occasional glance that his stomach is undeniably bigger. It protrudes, round and solid from beneath his collared shirt. He’d never been an indulgent eater; this bulge, she reasons, is due solely to beer. His hair is lighter than before and noticeably thinner.

They drive in silence for a while, each staring in their respective directions, she at the highway and he at the passing trees and exposed rock. After a few minutes he reaches over, turns on the radio to a classic rock station and begins playing air drums. Currents of irritation prickle her spine. He has no rhythm and is virtually tone deaf. She tries to ignore his flailing arms by concentrating on the road. Raindrops the size of pinpricks silently appear on the windshield. Natural pointillism, she thinks to herself.

While the bath was being drawn, the damsel was holed-up in her bedroom,
Scrutinizing a table with that scene painted on it—
The one where it’s said that Jove sends, you know,
A golden shower onto the bosom of Danaë.
I, too, began to examine the table, and because once upon a time
That god had played at the same game I was playing at now,
I was beside myself—to have turned himself into money, and slid
So surreptitiously through someone else’s roof tiles, a sham
In the form of a shower all done to bag his broad.
Ah, but what a god! He who makes the highest temples of heaven tremble with his explosions!
Should not I, a poor little man, do the same?
I did it just this way and am pleased. [...]
Was I to let pass so great an opportunity, so brief, so hoped-for,
So pined-after?
If that were the case, I would have actually been the eunuch I was pretending to be!

Art Credit: Gerald Perales, “Amor & Psyche”

Hence are words learnt, hence eloquence acquired—the greatest of necessities for outlining and inveigling your opinion. We oughtn’t to know such words as “golden shower,” “bosom,” “sham,” “heaven’s abodes,” and others, all writ in that passage, unless Terence had introduced a lewd teenager to his audience, proposing that Jupiter was his exemplar for illicit trysts—

And look how much he excites himself to lusty whim as if by celestial mandate:—

For all their moral torpor, these words aren’t learnt so easily—by means of them, vileness is just done with a little less scandal. I do not accuse the words themselves, being, as they are, choice and dear vessels. Yet the wine of error is supped by us, served to us by teachers drunk on its poison; should we drink, we are thrashed, with no sober judge to whom we may appeal. Yet, O my God, in whose sight my retelling is now safe-guarded, I learnt these dangerous thoughts willingly and delighted in them, and for this I was singled out as a promising student.

Oh, what an outrageous, funny bind, Cato!
It’s worth your attention and your guffaws.
Laugh, Cato, the more you love Catullus:
The matter is ridiculous, too funny.
Just moments ago, I caught my butt-boy red-handed,
Thrusting up against some girl.
If it please you, Venus, with my pen
I slew him for want of a weapon.

My father is coming over later. It’s Thursday and we are going to dinner, as we do on Thursdays. I am taller than my father. He will come and stand in the entryway with his hands in his pockets and say, “Hello, Daniel,” as if we have just made each other’s acquaintance. And I will bow my head a little to match him.

Since it is my day off, I have all afternoon to wait. I have been reading by the radiator, which is by the window. My apartment is filled with the damp cold of March, but my problem is the beeping. Ever since I moved in, there has been this beeping. It is sporadic. Two beeps close-together, then a long pause, then another long pause, then two beeps quicker than the first but wider apart. I walk around and listen in each corner, trying to scout it out. But the minute I get serious about listening, the beeps quit altogether. Sometimes I think it is someone’s microwave, maybe in the apartment upstairs (which holds the girl with the long thin braid). For a long time I thought the battery in the smoke detector was low. I’d check it, then make some tea and sit and stare at the blinking red eye that was somehow outwitting me.

I am waiting for my father to call. He will call from his office in Newton to confirm, as he does every Thursday. He will say, “Hello, Daniel.”

At midday I leave the radiator and enter the kitchen, as I am hungry. When I break eggs to make my lunch, the membrane coating the inside of the shell does not split. I carefully peel the shell away, and then I sit at the table and look down into a bowl holding one peach sac spread out like a dome. It wavers slightly when I tap the bowl. It is beautiful, like a cheek. I am tempted to poke at it, so I hold my fingers in fists. I decide to make a sandwich instead. The counter is sticky with jam, and the jam is gathering dust. I am waiting for my father to call. He will call from his office in Newton to confirm, as he does every Thursday. He will say, “Hello, Daniel.”

I return to my book, which is in translation. I am reading it again, this time in English. My eyes have fallen on a line, and they can’t move away from it. It is on the top of the page and I have read it many times but have no idea what it says: “The lack of adequate indications as to what happens after the balloon falls and the ambiguity about precisely what Solange and her partner are a prey to that transforms them into these magnificent predatory beasts is still what puzzles me par excellence.”

Translation has been my work for many years. French to English. Conference papers and directions. The notes on shampoo bottles. Mode D’Emploi: Massez sur les cheveux mouillés et rincez. The simple moments of the world split into two tellings.

My father once asked me to translate something for a business associate living in Algeria. It was a story, a long story, a long war story, about two brothers and their father. It was awful. A death march. My father would stand in my room as I worked. Right in the middle, wearing a striped shirt and a sweater, sometimes complaining that it was too cold. But otherwise, he would not blink. He would not move when I got up to get water. It took me months, and still he stood there. He was there when I woke up in the morning.

There is the beeping. Recently I have decided that it is a warning emanating from the power lines that hang down low and snake right into the house just outside of my bedroom window. A warning meant for someone in a building somewhere, flipping switches and ensuring the lights in the city do not go out. But the warning has come to me instead.

Two weeks into our adolescing acquaintance, just two weeks
Into your toothsome hello, it sometime happened
That you caught me smiling back.

I tell you sniveling, I live in the basement of our House—
In its dank, my thoughts meander, hide like roaches
And the mildew funk stoppers my nose, my lungs, my heart slow-beating.

I am cold in my youth. Often
I do not know what is going on.
“Is it my fault?” I ask the walls.

I squirm with the question
(Imagine gassed dogs in dumpsters).
I know what I am good for but have not had time to say.

Speech is my madman locked in a cell.
Railed layers bar my inmate tongue from his lips,
And my shivering arms cannot pry the cold rot with a steel.

Yet, arms tingling, I twist and stretch for the warmth removed
And from between my teeth
Now steal a glimmer with fat toothpicks.

I am no longer mortal-cold and blue-lipped
As I have time, I have place to say
My smile is opened. For, the tale turns,

I do not forget that I have things to scream
I do not forget that I have things to smile for
I do not forget that I do not do all things alone.

I made no promises to the Black dentist or messiah
Whose warm fingers lift my cheeks from the inside,
Though he made promises to me.

He told me I would not rot again, and I believed him.
Ten months later I still hang a crescent from my ears;
Ten months later I still show myself my teeth.

I do not understand it all, and I cannot always see—
But I salute you my dentist:
You have lifted me into my House, where the others have returned.

Because, two weeks in, you exalted promise
And ten months later I still have faith,
I have hope; I scream I smile.

ear President Obama,

I think your Nobel Prize has a touch of the absurd, but I don’t care. Your perfection represents our own. If you are the palette from which we no longer paint beige vacancies, from which America questions itself by painting new and lively impressions, then I am proud. If your prize is a testament to that, and not just a messianic anointment, then I am happy.

Perhaps there is a dark smear of ink on the pillow in some almost-distinguishable shape. You do not yet know how it came to be there or what it almost-resembles; but this is how the story starts, so it must be relevant.

Perhaps there is a weak beam of light filtering through the tattered blinds, illuminating the sugar-plum dance of dust particles across the sixteen-by-twenty-foot expanse. Cavernous, no? This studio apartment is a post-college luxury, but you’re not supposed to know that yet. Just like the new day that is doing its best, as we speak, to cross enemy lines, you have just been born and know next to nothing about the universe. But do try to keep up.

(Speaking of the universe—the single idea bloats a la Violet Beauregarde, only less blueberry-like, into an environment, a setting. Context? I think so. It is hasty, but we do not always have time for organic development. Just consider yourself fortunate I have omitted a reference to Alice in Wonderland. We do not like clichés.)

The beam of light makes it past the sugar-plum dust and perhaps illuminates tousled dark hair and a smooth expanse of tanned skin on a muscled back. I could have done worse, no?

(Then again, I don’t exist yet. Patience, my little newt.)

But this doesn’t feel right, does it? You seem to be getting uncomfortable. It’s probably best to turn away before Whoever-He-Is wakes up and there is talk of cheekbones, like in a three-dollar paperback – with Fabio on the cover – that twelve year old girls try to smuggle out of the drugstore before their mothers see.

Okay, fine.

The beam of light makes it past the sugar-plum dust and perhaps illuminates only a mess of tangled sheets soaked in last night’s sweat: a cotton-polyester concave where a real person ought to be. But then, this would be a story about loneliness. That’s entirely too easy for you—you are a bit masochistic and most definitely want to work just a bit harder. Mister Dark Hair is back. He doesn’t turn around, though; he is still passed out. He can be relevant while unconscious.

(Consciousness of—? Why yes, Virginia, we do have a protagonist.)

At this point, I am supposed to alert you to my existence by a gesture in the third person, but it seems too impersonal in light of our history together. I hope you’re not uncomfortable again.

I make some sort of movement to alert you to said existence. Maybe my eyes flutter open as if from a pleasant dream. I may swat at a spider that has been creeping up my forearm, or be stirred by the rumbling in my stomach, regretting the fact that I drank my dinner last night. Given the smear and Mister Unconscious, I’ll let you guess which. Oh, the smear is back? Why, yes; you still cannot make out what it is, but there is a mirror image on my hand, presumably put there by some bouncer at a bar for the purpose of re-entry. To be sure, it is also smeared somewhere on my face: I’m a restless sleeper. There is cohesion to the story now, but you’re getting much too excited.

“It’s about loneliness after all!” No. Try again.

“Regret? Alcohol and men, what else can it be?” Strike two.

“Empty, meaningless existence?” You know, if you wanted to read about ennui, you should have just grabbed the portable Dorothy Parker collection and left well enough alone. You’re bad at this. You really just ought to let me continue.

(Some action to move the story forward, yada yada, it doesn’t really matter what I do for the next five minutes because)

You discover a small detail or two about the universe that gives you an insight into who I really am as a person. My character, I suppose. I walk to the bathroom to wash my face, and on the plastic tile around the sink you see a sprinkling of white powder.

I wish I were exciting enough for a drug addiction, so I am sorry to let you down in this instance. It’s only Clorox from when I scrubbed the tub yesterday morning. I clean when I’m stressed out (You can add that to your Small Detail collection and make some inferences regarding our little universe, the smear, and Mister Tanned Skin).

I put on the nearest clothing (blue terrycloth bathrobe) and footwear (black stiletto pumps) and head outside to enjoy my morning cigarette.

(Perhaps I will die of lung cancer while giving birth to an underweight baby. Somehow that doesn’t seem to matter this early in the morning. Or late in the afternoon. Or sometime during this day that ends with -Y. Okay, we like some clichés.)

The world is simply oozing cheer and festering with productivity. The newspaper boxes get filled by the faceless and underpaid, while the bums emerge onto their corners, ready to throw your sandwich back at you because, damn it, they wanted cash.

I finish my cigarette and try to head back indoors, but you rudely try to stop me. Apparently, while I was observing the New Day begin outside, I was supposed to have some sort of revelation. There was some grand conclusion I was supposed to arrive at which would give you insight into adulthood. Perhaps a new worldview? Or maybe a commentary on city life and alienation; your type sure seems to like those. You nod vehemently; I am definitely on the right track.

“A story isn’t a story unless the protagonist undergoes a Change!” So now I’m supposed to change for you? We are barely acquaintances, please. Just because we speak informally does not mean you can go about making demands and such. I think I’ll go back upstairs to my fiancé instead.

“Fiancé!? But I thought Mister Muscled Back was a one-night stand!”

Really now. Is there any reason at all that he should be?

“Yes! Typically in stories, the protagonist goes through difficulties and makes bad decisions. That’s what makes the writing interesting.”

Oh, my; aren’t you agitated? If anything I should be the upset one, since apparently I can only amuse you through my suffering. Granted, the Mister is not my fiancé. My point is, however, that there is no reason for him not to be.

There is no reason that I didn’t stress-clean because I was nervous before going into the legal firm at which I work because yesterday was the day Mr. Wendell would let me know whether it was I or Jeremy from Contract Law who got the promotion. There is no reason that my whatever-he-is didn’t take me out on the town to celebrate my being the first woman to make partner in the history of the firm. There is no reason I wasn’t fully satisfied while smoking my cigarette until I realized that, to my chagrin, I would be going to work slightly hung-over on my first day in the new leadership position. Cue temporary embarrassment but general contentment with my life.

You feel led on; used, even. Yet I don’t understand why happiness appalls you so. Do you also look at photos of puppies playing in the garden and say, “Great! Now let’s see one of them getting hit by a Mack Truck”? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Oh, you think I’m being unfair. How about the fact that you wouldn’t like me unless I was coked out, being shot at, or clinically depressed? How the hell is that fair?

Sigh. I suppose this whole writing business really is about you. Maybe it is time we part ways after all. I really enjoyed our time together, but I have to get ready for work now and down some coffee, and you apparently have some Sylvia Plath to re-digest. I did my job; I unsettled you. Granted, it’s not in the way you really expected, but, again, isn’t that the point?

I promise, though: I’ll call you the second the Mister leaves me, I get fired, and start to eat my feelings in Thin Mints and Tagalongs. Scout’s honor.

arie drinks whiskey on the rocks. She drinks instead of yelling, instead of arguing, instead of crying. She drinks instead of asking me to please, please come home early, to please call when I’ll be late, to please hold and touch and fuck her sweetly but only sometimes. She strips down to panties and a T-shirt and sits in the front-room window on nights especially lonely, her draining glass glowing amber in the streetlight.

This is how I find her when I come home to my darkened living room: my Marie silhouetted on the sill, her head resting against the pane and her breath fogging the frosty glass. She doesn’t look up when I shut the door.

It’s somehow chillier in here than it is outside.

“Marie,” I say, “it’s cold.” She takes a long drink from her glass and stretches before descending from her perch—her dark, long hair undone and her pale thighs cool and her lips full and shining and tinged blue even in the dark.

“Your dinner is in the kitchen,” she says, walking past me, and drains the last of her drink into her mouth before disappearing into the bedroom.

Eggplant Parmesan with roasted asparagus is on the counter, congealing in its juices under plastic wrap. Wedges of limes and oranges dance along the edge of the plate: the pattern she picked out when we moved into the apartment in the spring, the pattern I had told her again and again I hated. I was almost glad when I came home a few weeks ago to broken shards of limes and oranges littering our kitchen floor, until I found Marie in the bathroom picking tiny pieces of ceramic from the soles of her feet, her glass of whiskey teetering on the sink. She looked up at me.

“I haven’t painted anything lately,” she said.

This plate must be one of the survivors, though I didn’t know there were any. I scoop its contents into the trash.

I think Marie was on a vegetarian kick. The refrigerator is packed with rotting vegetables because neither of us eats much anymore. But the freezer has been restocked with frosty bottles of her Jim Beam soldiers, all lined up in a row. I push aside the slimy bag of cilantro for a beer.

I don’t bother taking my coat off as I sit down on the couch, staring at my distorted reflection in the darkened television screen. Marie loved this coat last winter when it was new, and when she licked snowflakes from my eyelashes and when I didn’t work so much. She’d stop me in the middle of the street to check her lipstick in its shiny silver buttons. Then she’d tighten the scarf around my neck and flip up the collar of my coat.
“Now you look like an undercover spy,” she’d say, “and all you need is an undercover hat.”

I didn’t come home in the middle of the night then, drowning as I am now in a whirlwind of paperwork. I came home at a decent hour, not to a dark apartment with a mere shadow of my Marie to greet me but to the balmy, stinging smell of turpentine and oil paints, and one of her latest works in progress propped on an easel in the living room. Those vibrant colors of nonsensical scenes welcomed me: her very essence captured on canvas. I never understood them, though. Like the hand with an eye embedded into its palm, pink soap bubbles clinging to the fingertips, or – I don’t know where she comes up with these things – the severed limbs hanging from a clothesline strung above a cityscape.

“Why aren’t they bleeding?” I had asked her. She laughed.

“They’re not real severed limbs: They’re milagros,” she said. “But, you know, like made real. In the painting.”

I stared at the canvas. The severed foot had pink polish on its toenails.

“Oh, just forget it.” She put her hands on her hips and began to walk away.

“But I love it!” I said and pulled her into me. “My little Kahlo, with your milagros and tortillas and burritos. Go back to Mexico, why don’t you?”

When I look at her paintings, I see Marie, and that is why I love them. And they were everywhere: hung up above the couch, above the television and opposite the bathroom mirror, but also propped up against the baseboards, spread out over the coffee table and leaning against couch cushions. They were always changing, always giving the apartment a different feel; always disappearing as she sold them but always replaced as she painted new ones. The paintings started dwindling, though; I don’t remember when I noticed exactly. All I know is there aren’t any around anymore, and the apartment feels empty without them.

He walked, or attempted to walk, along the beach. He hoped that being free would make the tequila’s effects weaker. The movement of the waves and the pounding in his stomach and head proved the effects were not diminishing.

As he strolled on the hard sand, Henry Harrison felt the early-morning results of a late night. The sun was only beginning to break through the clouds, so he did not need sunblock, or his wife telling him he needed sunblock. His wife, Julie Harrison, the former Julie Johnson, was still in a deep sleep, he assumed. Or not. Did he care? She probably would not miss him if she were awake, nor would she miss him if she were asleep. The same at home. Being somewhere on vacation did not actually change things.

He tried avoiding the waves rolling upon the beach, trying to catch him. They almost succeeded. He felt out of place and uncomfortable. Puerto Vallarta was the place for couples. Yet he was alone on the beach. Must be the tequila.

That sweet, strong drink was not to blame, however, for thinking his wife wanted to return to being Julie Johnson and be his ex-wife.

He watched a pelican glide down into the water and rise immediately after and fly away. Is this what his wife wanted? Freedom to fly away?

Is that what he wanted? Looking out onto the expanse of the water, a suicidal ideation swam into his confused consciousness. But, at the age of forty-five, a suicide is not a statement anyone thinks to notice; it’s the young ones who get the attention and grieving. Hell, they’d only say “what a waste” about him.

He looked around him. The brochure called all of this a paradise. How could he have suicidal thoughts in paradise?

They honeymooned here twenty years ago. At that time she would have been walking with him. Now, she slept—which she had been doing more and more of late.

Twenty years ago he showed off to her by running on the sand and deftly dodging waves, up and down. Now he stumbled in a drunken stupor. Now he was alone.

Amigo, you want a hat? Ssoombrreerroo—jus’ for you.”

He looked up at a stout man holding several straw hats. He had the honor of being the first customer of the day to say, “No, thanks.”

He heard families speaking in a distance, parents admonishing children and calling them.

“Papi, ven, venaca … ahora!”

The buses were hurtling through the streets, amid the honking of bicycle horns and the music of car radios. More birds appeared, besides the pelicans, flying and squealing.

He saw a dark circle in the sand before him. There were scattered logs, and several beer cans, bottles of vodka, tequila. Seeing the tequila caused a ripple in his stomach. There was Ripple wine, and other kinds. Panties, men’s underwear. Cigarette butts throughout the unholy scene. It was not time for a Day of the Dead celebration. A celebration of some kind occurred, however.

He noticed some movement to the right of him. A young couple, naked, lay on a blanket. Oh, to be young again, he thought. Oh, to be naked and drunk and not give a fuck. Oh. They looked to be eighteen. She had long light brown hair, straight, hanging all over her back, yet leaving her hips and her wonderfully round, firm bottom exposed.

The lad had the short, cropped hair of an athlete, the biceps of an athlete, and the gift of young pussy given to all athletes. Oh, to be a sportsman rather than a sad accountant.

the corpse is a hard
business; we scalpel
America
life lived on
anatomy lab stools and
cold coffee
sandwiches
eaten in the sweet stink
of decaying bodies

madness, all
kinds of
madness

“among other things, we
live off advanced
pathology—almost
parasitical”

piling
bones against memory

I could feel his words in my hand
as if Cortez himself had opened that
hydrant on Roosevelt
a city I
don’t remember, moving through
as much time as space—corner
of Chicago and Cicero, ice cream
trucks moving their product in August
half-melt and voices hawking the Sun-
Times or between cars,
man in a black suit
and tie calls,

“there’s an enlightened man!”

(how much radiance can you stand, brother?

your four years in
the Illinois College
of Medicine (your
graduation photo,
my first hard relic)

meanwhile, in the
anatomy labs, George
Miller, the custodian,
gathers the detritus:

candy bar wrappers,
hasty notes, surfaces
of muscle, skull and
skin—the preened
curiosity of a stopped
dog’s heart

box of
bones rolled down
the hall after sister

When I was younger, I kept a jar of peanut butter. It was just a normal jar of peanut butter, but he was actually my best friend. I took him everywhere with me; he slept in my bed with me. Most kids have a stuffed animal: I had a jar of peanut butter. I decided to see if my daughter would enjoy it as much as I did as a child. I went to the grocery store and found the aisle with the peanut butter, stared at the shelf, ogled all the jars. I tried to be a five-year-old; I tried to pick the peanut butter I would want as a five-year-old. Organic peanut butter. Chunky peanut butter. Peanut butter with purple jelly in there, too—that could be fun. But I just picked one with a red lid. The red was nice. It made the five-year-old me feel safe. I brought it home and gave it to her. Gave it to my daughter. I wanted to see if it could be her best friend. She asked me to open the lid—she wanted to eat her new friend. I was upset; I was angry. But then I decided it was a good thing that my daughter was nothing like me.

I had to put her to bed tonight. She asked for a story.

“Do you know the story of how I fell in love with your mom?”

She didn’t.

“Everyday she rode her bike down my street. Everyday I would see her. And, one day, I saw her – saw her just like every other day – and realized that I was in love with her. So I bought a chair (I only had one chair and one tiny table in my house). I bought another chair. And then I stopped her on the street. I asked her if she would like a glass of iced tea. She said yes. I told her I didn’t have any sugar; but that was all right, it was “all right,” she said. I gave her a glass of iced tea, put a straw in it. And she asked me if I was going to have a glass, too. I told her that I only had one glass. ‘You only have one glass?’ I told her how there is only one of me. ‘Don’t you have any friends?’ I have a friend. I have one friend. But he doesn’t need a glass. He lives inside the glass. And she said, “This might be crazy, but I think I love you.” I told her it was crazy, and that’s how we fell in love.”

My daughter asked if that’s really how it happened.

“No, we met in a bar,” I said.

“I like it better that way.”

“Which way?”

“The second way.”

“Oh.”

“Dad, you know what we should get?”

“What’s that?”

“One of those vacuums. You know, like on tv. They go around the whole house by themselves. And they just know where to go and what to do, all by themselves. You don’t have to guide them or anything. They just know.”

I want one, too. I want a giant one. And I’ll just ride around on it. It will go where it’s supposed to go, because it just knows. And I will ride it. Because it knows.