It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.

Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.