Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this world to eternity.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.

Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.

Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.