But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?