***
The Cause refused to pay a royalty for The Sphere, a source of endless consternation for Volp. The authority received hundreds of letters a day, now running three to one in favor of the story, and he found the Party’s wholesale theft unconscionable. Eventually he settled on product placement as a way to generate revenue from the success of the series. He instructed Mutt, who in turn instructed Ivy, to work in various references to specific products with predictable comic effect. When Huston high-kicked an enemy agent in the throat instantly killing him, the story carefully labeled his boot as a “genuine Tri-bar leather workboot,” as if that detail mattered to the dead spy. When Posy drank prune juice under the misconception it was a contraceptive, it was identified as “Hollow Farms One Hundred Percent Bug-Free Prune Juice,” as if that might increase sales. The story line was developing beautifully though and readers kept sending letters offering advice on how to raise a love child in a sapper nest, or how to cure Huston’s growing addiction to the nabana peel, or whether Posy’s interest in the undertaker was justified given Huston’s dalliance with the telegraph operator, and so on. Readers agreed that the scene in which Huston’s dead body mysteriously rolled in on an embalming cart just as the undertaker embraced Posy by the vat of formaldehyde, only for Posy to collapse onto the cart declaring her undying love for her departed, with Huston then dramatically awakening and carting her back out the door from whence he came, was a bit overwrought, yet it generated more letters than any other scene.

Despite Ivy’s control of the story Mutt continued to supply many of the plot ideas, including the formaldehyde scene of which he was especially proud. So now Posy had been banished to the vat room by a father angry at her unplanned pregnancy while Huston’s sapper brigade was burying seven tons of dynamite beneath that very same room and he knew he would soon receive orders to blow up the compound but if he did so he would lose the love of his life and their unborn child and if he refused he would lose his own life. He was leaning toward explosion under the evil spell of the telegraph operator while Posy was busily convincing her father that this was a virgin pregnancy and God was speaking through her body all the while still meeting Huston for passionate liaisons through the secret tunnel behind a huge pile of alum laced with toxins.

“This is not a good idea.”

The puppy leaped about a corner of the hut trapped by Skavian gravity. Hope stepped forward to her daddy.

“I wanna puppy.”

Ivy had been coaching her. She was irresistible when she spoke in complete sentences.

“We don’t need a dog,” Mutt pleaded.

“But the mice get lonely,” Ivy pleaded back.

Hope held the puppy in her arms and uttered another complete sentence.
“It’s my birfday.”
Mutt had been completely outfoxed on this one.

“What shall we name it?” he relented.

“It’s a he,” said Ivy.

“Kippers,” said the little girl. Her mother had been showing her a picture book about a dog living in a cannery in Dark Harbor that ate only kippers and accompanied a lifeboat crew on rescues.

It was her second birthday.

Ivy knew she faced berating for not consulting her husband on the new addition so she took him aside, cradling the licking puppy in her arms, and told him they were going to kill the poor creature if nobody took him. Kippers apparently kept wandering over the edge from Skava until the gendarmerie gave up on returning him. Mutt wanted to argue on principle but decided he could not be a spoilsport on his daughter’s birthday. The celebration had taken place the day before – he thought a rocking ox was a sufficient gift – and the puppy, a common fetcher, pounced about party debris Ivy had tossed into a corner. Mutt set to work nailing plywood into the corner to give him a flat surface to romp on, much like the rotating wall panels in the church. Now began a crash course in puppy gravity conversion. For all his disorientation Kippers handled it quite well, recovering quickly from the frequent bouts of retching.

Mutt collapsed in exhaustion after the party having skipped the last sleeping hour engrossed in his story. When he awoke the hut was immaculately clean as Ivy sat in a tubestalk bowl chair admiring their sleeping daughter. He felt guilty because he had promised to share clean-up duty but Ivy told him not to worry, there was plenty he could do outside. He walked around the perimeter of the mound gathering up dislodged thatch, detached the loft ladder and set it up in various locations around the roof line, and began the treacherous job of reridging the roof. He found the physical labor clarifying, a welcome respite from his fixation on Huston and Posy. But he also worked out in meticulous detail a vat room scene that he decided would dominate the second installment.

He ran his new idea by Ivy who told him absolutely no. How could he top such a scene in the third chapter? Mutt had to agree he had left too little to the imagination, perhaps taking Volp’s advice too far. Ivy’s other point was that readers should be interested in these characters before throwing them together in a vat room. She was all for a lusty scene eventually but felt tension needed to be developed first. Mutt thought maybe Huston could rescue Posy from a diabolical creature with noodly appendages but Ivy had other ideas. The girl, she said, should be deeply mysterious. This seemed like a good idea to Mutt. But should not the boy also have secrets? No, said Ivy, the voyeur instinct runs mainly to women, even among women readers. The imagination is more stoked by a woman’s hidden past. For a man the thoughts that come to mind are too conventional, too non-transgressive. For a sweet innocent girl like Posy the mind subconsciously supplies dark horrors that keep a reader titillated. Mutt realized Ivy was seizing control of the story but liked where she was taking it.

Ivy stood at the chopping block dicing celery in a vise, Hope perched on a hip secure in the crook of her mother’s arm. It was the child’s first birthday and she watched the knife intently, little arms flared outward from a sleeveless vest, tiny thumb twirling against tiny forefinger. She just now had enough hair for Ivy to gather in a stalk albeit without much spillage above the tie. Her hair remained sandy like Mutt’s but Ivy was convinced it would darken to charcoal in due time. They celebrated the little girl’s birthday by giving her a pudding muffin to see how big a mess she could make.

The real party would be in three days when they would host a gathering for all the children of the Notches including the two born after Hope. It had been a bumper year. The chopping block was a familiar chunk of wood that Mutt had been forced to recondition into a table. He had lost the debate over the inherent ickiness of eating food from the same block on which Ivy had given birth. In a last ditch effort at compromise he proposed flipping it over and using the other side but Ivy would have none of it. She took a certain earthy pleasure in connecting the processes of food preparation and childbirth. They both required effort; they both yielded delectable results. This was her domain and he would have to obey. Mutt could always figure out how long they had lived in the Notches by taking Hope’s age and adding nine months. So here it was a year and nine months later, the length of a normal courtship, and they were married with a one-year-old and Mutt plotting to sneak in another. He had the feeling he had known Ivy much longer, as if they had experienced a trial period before marriage and passed the compatibility test. She was an easy wife to live with. What she wanted, she got. He learned that lesson early and often. But she did not ask for much and took great pride in her role in the family.

If he had one complaint it was the reduction in lovemaking, as if there were a fixed amount of baby care and coupling in a relationship, and the increase in one led to a decrease in the other. Ivy was adamant she was not going to whelp on an assembly line and Mutt was content to accept her wisdom to a point. In his mind two years was a good spacing for children and he looked forward to giving Hope a sibling in the near future. Indeed that had been a clenching argument for keeping the birthing board. “What will we use next time?” Ivy settled on plotting her fertility according to her period, hardly a precise method, and strictly denied Mutt access during that window. She did not trust him to show restraint if she displayed weakness. She was living out the dream that filled her head in her last days in Harmour. She never had a particularly romanticized notion of sex or marriage. She enjoyed the bickering and bargaining as much as the sharing, the warts and calluses along with the smiles. She wanted to be his Hutwoman wife, and wives were creatures husbands fought with as well as, hopefully, loved. She viewed all love, even true love, as a process of mutual manipulation, the true part being genuine affection and consideration of the other’s feelings and an occasional willingness to confess error. What she liked most was feeling that she belonged to a family, that her person was important to other people, that they would face challenges big and small together, that her travails were shared.

After a few weeks they achieved nearly adjacent strips in the rounder and could, by resting on a slight upslope, sleep together again, much to Ivy’s relief. It was now time to find a normal house. They were able to navigate the Notches without need of weight suits, walking about on a ten degree slope which could be tiring but manageable. The slop-lady, the father’s wife, was a central repository of useful knowledge and directed the couple to a listing of available housing on the bulletin board. Cottage, cottage, apartment, flat, barn loft, converted shed, deluxe tent, sty keeper, and so on they read. But when their eyes came across the words “hut for rent” they knew they had found their home. Mutt had to cash in his entire canteen credit and Ivy had to increase the wholesale price of her cravats but they managed in short order to scrape together a deposit.

They found the ancient hut perched several feet atop a mound having survived the last deepening of the Notches eighty years ago. While they were hoping to fall in love with its rustic charm it was a tad dilapidated, its thatch having significantly thinned and its mud-moss walls discolored from a rusty cistern leaking on the roof and the relentless assaults of edge storms. But the price was right and they had found their home, the Hutman dwelling of their dreams. It was here, they decided, they would have their child. Ivy threw herself full force into the role of homemaker. This was her Hutman, she was his Hutwoman, and this was their hut. The one-room interior with loft was sparsely furnished. She set about the garbage heaps and secondhand lots of the Notches looking for decorations and furnishings on the cheap. The Notches had little manufacturing and most household items were oriented to Arland or Skava, requiring brackets and nails and cords and creative positioning for use on the angled plane. She hit upon a lake theme for the interior, having in mind the huts on the floating islands of Lake Looda outside Leri Deri. Mutt was not consulted on this decision but was expected to help implement it. She found driftwood with the gravity of both great nations and had Mutt construct various shelves and ensconcements for it. She strung powder blue prayer flags across the ceiling interspersed with white netting to simulate sky and clouds and potted dwarf lotus trees in the corners to mimic the forests on the shores of the great lake. She found a captain’s wheel which Mutt mounted along the railing of the loft next to the ladder and placed a couple of bottled boats on counters positioned to hide cracked glass.

Mutt was the first to awake. Ivy lay on her stomach, rising at a right angle from the edge of the haysacks. Her limbs spilled out from a sheet wrapped around her torso, still naked underneath. He watched her breathing, mesmerized. He could not believe what had happened just hours before. How stupid could he be? He did not know this woman. She had terrible secrets she would not share. He could not fathom throwing away the life he had known and confining himself to this small patch of ground with a stranger. Yet he had tried to get her pregnant. It occurred to him now that she seduced him. He had been so concerned about not using her that he never considered she might be using him. She wanted to have a baby because that was the only way to force him to stay. He felt like his dick was a leash and she was leading him around by it. Ivy awoke. She turned toward him and ran her leg between his. She was still thinking of the gift he had given her. She had received all of him and had no desire to go back. She sensed he was brooding and propped her head on an arm.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She drew her leg back and sat up.

“What are you thinking?”

He smiled uneasily. “I’m just thinking about what we did.”

“I am too. They are good thoughts.”

“Ivy, what are we doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. We shouldn’t be together like that. I was trying to get you pregnant.”

Ivy was alarmed.

“I was trying too, Mutt. I want,” she paused, “I wanted ...” She breathed unevenly. She was about to cry.

“How can we have a baby? We’re helpless here. We can’t even take care of ourselves. We’re not, I mean, we didn’t really plan to be married.”

“You think I’m trying to trap you.”

He had kept open the possibility of returning to Shivaree because he took comfort in having options. But he could not drag out his indecision forever. He reached across the table and took her plate. He held it vertically in front of him so that the food, which had the gravity of Skava, stayed on the plate. With his free hand he scooped polenta in a spoon and brought it to his mouth, holding the spoon vertically so it would not spill. He was not sure how to get it into his mouth. He wedged it in from the side, closed his lips, turned the spoon horizontal, and withdrew it, his lips smacking on the wood as it exited.

“This is not going to be easy.”

She reached across and took his plate. As she ate she began to tear up. He was converting his gravity for her. He was willing to stay in the Notches.

“You do not have to do this,” she said softly.

“I am past the point of no return. I will stay with you as long as you wish.” He felt this was the honorable thing to say.

She had never before experienced the sensation of such a promise. It was the natural continuation of the kindness he had shown since rescuing her at the Edge yet it was completely alien to her prior life. Here was a person willing to help because he cared about her. She was deeply emotional and wanted to do something for him. The radical thought she had earlier was no longer seeming so radical. Mutt halfway suspected she might be his lover if he agreed to stay. But he had no idea what she was really thinking.

The situation in the angle was becoming unbearable. Mutt refused to convert to the orientation of the Notches and Ivy refused because he refused. He pleaded with her to find help. Surely she knew someone in Skava who could take her in. Ivy told him that he was it, that she had no one else on the planet to protect her, and that if he abandoned her she would go back to Skava and be killed. Mutt had not signed on to be her actual husband. He had not even signed on to be her pretend husband. That was all Ivy’s improvisation and he foolishly went along. Mutt’s refusal to convert hung in the air as a threat of abandonment, of returning to Shivaree, but although this seemed to him the reasonable course of action, he could not bring himself to do it. He could not sort out his feelings. He knew if he left, he would think of her the rest of his life. Her presence, her body, was so immediate in this small room. He wanted to be her lover. He felt that if he were her husband, even a pretend husband, he should not be so cruelly teased. If they were to share this room he wanted to share her body. But when he thought of converting his desire to action he felt dirty, like he would be taking advantage of her, like he would be letting his mother down. Perhaps Ivy would relent in desperation but he could not so callously put his interests above hers. If caring about a woman meant anything it was putting her interests first. She was here only because she had no options. Life had steered her into a dead end and he was her only salvation. The measure of his self worth was how he handled this situation. He could not coerce her. It was his duty to protect her.

His resolve was not helped by their frequent touching. Ivy needed to be held in her sleep. She wanted the comfort of a man, to feel secure in his arms. She had lost everything and was clinging to this last hope fate had thrown her way. The world had turned incredibly hostile toward her, malicious and evil. She wanted refuge; she wanted escape. She found him attractive, even beautiful, but what she liked most was the gentleness of his face. She could not imagine him ever hurting her. Although he tried to conceal it, she could feel his arousal when he held her. She loved to know she had this effect on him. They had not kissed since the pretend wedding, with Ivy turning her head when they got close and burrowing backwards into him. She was uncomfortable being physical in this environment, surrounded by haysacks and a lack of alternatives, not knowing where it might lead. She was content to be held, to at least mimic the feeling of love, of having a husband to protect her. Mutt could not contain himself when she lay with him and took to kissing her lightly on the back of her neck, or on the ear, occasionally resting his hand on her hip. She was stimulated by the touching and eventually turned to face him, to kiss him tenderly, then more aggressively. She struggled to keep his hands at bay and ultimately settled into a clothed sexual posture, with her leg pulled over his midsection, as a compromise between his desire and her reserve. They would lay like that for hours and kiss, their bodies increasingly bonding in the fold of the angle. Eventually she relented and let him feel her breasts over her cloth. She loved the massaging and tweaking and soon he worked his way under for a direct feel. He was surprised at how focused he was on each part of her body as he explored it. He had just assumed that sex was the goal and foreplay the means of transit. But the novelty of the touching, the tenderness of her reactions, the feeling of a million little conquests, her reluctance giving way to pleasure, their growing intimacy all melted him into her, arousing him more thoroughly than any shortcut to paradise could.

***
The walk to the angle house was excruciating with the newlyweds negotiating a series of traction studs and angular garden stones like goats on a steep incline. The father could not support them both simultaneously and elected to support neither. Through an arch in the colonnade of the cloister they emerged into a small garden across which rested a bizarre block house set in the ground tilted on a corner, a partially submerged four-sided diamond clad in cream stucco with teal shutters. So this was what the father called an angle house. A small half-pipe led from the cloister through the garden to a decline down to the door of the house. The father opened the door and led them inside to a narrow landing on which he stood upright with the gravity of the Notches.

The floor turned upward from the landing on either side at a forty-five degree angle to form a “v” shape, creating two floors at perfect right angles to one another, one for the gravity of Arland, the other for Skava. Where the landing stopped the two floors met in a corner at a right angle extending to the far wall. Here in this house people from the great nations could coexist, the floor for one being a wall for the other. Each floor looked like a sparsely furnished bedroom with a sideland bedroom oriented at a right angle taking up a wall. Haysacks lay against the far walls of the respective floors such that a person sleeping on one would perceive the other as sleeping at the top of a bedroom wall. By a window at the far end of the corner from the landing, in the fold of the two rooms, stood an L-shaped table at which an Arlander could break bread with a Skavian, each using one segment of the “L” as a flat surface with their dinner companion using the other, their heads converging in the space above the table at an implied corner of a crude square formed by the two floors underneath and their seated bodies.

The Notches was not a place where anyone chose to live. Circumstances chose it for them. Once there a person was confined to the small strip of land practically barred from visiting the great nations due to the enormous time and resources necessary to convert gravity. Many of the residents could not return to their homelands having been banished for various reasons ranging from political agitation to unsanctioned love. Children were a rare commodity in the parks and only playground, most people having fled from mistakes of youth, or so passionate for a calling they had no time for family, or disinterested in fertile wants, or reclusive by nature. But there was a small contingent of little ones spanning the ages of development, and the birth of a new child on this plane was a widely celebrated event, a reification of life in a refuge of lost souls. Stairs within the half-pipe descended to the plane where the trail leveled out into a worm path winding through the Notches spanned by overhanging footpaths and byways. The six spires of the church, each representing a facet of the planet, could be seen towering over the lip of the half-pipe. Mutt continued to hold Ivy’s hand wondering where they were going. They each followed the other and together were aimless.

In the distance a man in a brightly flowing gown descended a side staircase into the half-pipe and gazed upon their advent. He was a Father of the Church garbed in an individuating robe. By tradition the lower fathers weaved colorful patterned gowns symbolizing their personal relationship with God and the cosmos, often with the help of their flock at weave gatherings, such events being a source of endless merriment. The more striking and colorful the robe the better, for they were designed to transport the viewer into an alternative universe in which color and pattern reigned, much as the faithful conceived of heaven. The father had seen this odd couple descending the half-pipe from the Edge, their bodies oriented at right angles, heads nearly touching in the confines of the scoop, hands spanning the gap between their waists. Ivy realized what he must be thinking. Surely they could not be the first couple to wander out of the wilderness into the Notches. She pulled Mutt forward energetically by the hand and approached the holy man, her face radiant.

Mutt sat her down on the side of a hillock. He was famished from the exertion and they had little food. She realized how difficult this was and offered him her last angoo. He declined for he would not take food from a sick woman. Finally she proposed that he carry her to the Edge and she would forage for fruit in Skava. Arland had only berries to offer in this area and neither could tell which ones were poisonous. He was leery of approaching the Edge where patrols could easily spot them and the military might be deployed. But he was starved. He dropped her into Skava and she ran off into the forest, grimacing from the exertion, returning a half hour later with a satchel full of semi-rotten drop angoos. They lay on the grass on their respective sides with sated but dyspeptic stomachs, Ivy thankful for the level ground. The tree trunks and hillocks, and Mutt’s lumbering body, were not comfortable perches in Arland’s vertical world. She was startled by a noise in the woods and quickly rolled over the Edge into his arms. After another mile of trekking he thought his right arm would fall off. He sat her down on the side of a large sycamore where she reclined on the slanted trunk using her satchel as a headrest. Her dress was in tatters and she occupied a hand full time holding it together.

“How far do you think we’ve gone?” she asked. “Halfway?”

Mutt stared at her incredulously. “If three is half of seventy-five, yes.”

She looked pitiful. For the first time in days pain was not her dominant sensation. She realized the absurdity of her situation, stuck on the side of a tree in Arland trusting for her survival in a total stranger. She had believed intuitively that he of all people would be the one to save her from the hell of Harmour. But she was helpless and would not be surprised to find herself abandoned to die on this trunk. Her life had been defined by painful loss and there was no reason for her losing streak to stop. Mutt could not fathom her expression but she could fathom his even less. He was living out a chivalric fantasy. This completely helpless woman had literally fallen into his arms from another world and it was now his sacred duty to rescue her. He imagined the reward she might be willing to offer for his sacrifice and completely swore it off in his mind, for to seek favors for rescue was to sully the purity of intent. He unconditionally had to save this girl with no regard to his own interest or he had failed as a man. His mother had taught him no less. But looking at her, as the glow of her face was returning with her health, he wanted to kiss her. He lowered his gaze and resolved to suppress any further desire.

The mood in Shivaree was tense. The Mothers Hall had taken its vote. War was declared. No one knew for certain what this meant. But in the short term it meant the patrols were being called. Ruggin might be deployed to Bivenal. Mutt would be called to military reserve duty in the interior. The Armada was assembling for an attack on Bivens Mill. Opinions in Shivaree were split on the wisdom of the war declaration. Muglair’s assertion of a natural right to an equal allocation of water per person was compelling to many of the Arlander Hutmen, but few doubted that he was pushing for war unnecessarily by his refusal to compromise. The Mothers Hall passed a resolution along with the war declaration proclaiming that the ratio of water usage would be adjusted over a ten-year period provided each country met certain alternative energy targets. While the resolution would not achieve equal sharing at the conclusion of the ten years it would increase Skava’s per capita allotment while reducing Arland’s, with an overall reduction to allow the Silent Sea to replenish. Muglair rejected the resolution outright as a cynical ploy to maintain Arland’s hegemony and announced that he would proceed to bring the new hydroelectric plant online. The Mothers had little choice but to declare war. Permitting Muglair to dictate international relations would set a dangerous precedent and embolden him to even greater belligerence.

Muglair had been girding for war for years and his moment had arrived. He had stationed over twenty thousand oriented troops in Bivenal, mostly at Bivens Mill. He had commenced construction of his own armada although he had nothing to match the mighty ballast ships of Arland. But what he lacked in raw military might he made up for with nationalist fervor. Skava was ready to fight and was not afraid of defeat. As Muglair often proclaimed, defeat was preferable to ignoble compromise. Arland’s presence in Bivenal was weak, limited only to a few outposts housing not more than a thousand soldiers. Bivenal was on the opposite side of the planet from Arland and held little strategic interest. Its utility to Skava was limited to hydroelectric plants and way stations for travelers to the canneries of Dark Harbor, located just over the edge in Parva. Like Parva and Klokomad, the other dark sides, Bivenal was beyond the reach of the sun and mostly barren. Not since the age of exploration, when Bivens first charted the territory and discovered a small species of luminous frog in the edge moss, had Bivenal received so much attention.

***
Muglair Putie had been a fixture in the Hutman cause for two decades. He was a lieutenant to the leadership during the great repression when the Hutman leaders were arrested for treason and subjected to summary trials in the People’s Hall. The Inta regime concluded that the cause had become a threat to its maintenance of power and that piecemeal accommodation would no longer work. The conviction of the leaders was a foregone conclusion once they were arrested. Within a day of trial they were trundled to the vast sandstone plaza before the Hall where people, primarily Inta, regularly gathered for official pronouncements. The condemned were led naked in shackles up scaffolding to the tip of a needle, a sharpened spike over forty feet high. Executioners raised their bodies above the tips and slowly forced them down, piercing their abdomens and impaling them. The scaffolding was pivoted away from the needles allowing the bodies to slide to a small handle in the spike fifteen feet above the ground. There they came to rest like insect specimens, limbs splayed outwards and agonized faces turned heavenward. Death came slowly and mercilessly in the sun’s blinding rays beneath the bloodstained needles their bodies had just descended. Spiking was the ancient form of execution designed to instill fear in a restive populace, and it had been resurrected by the Inta for that purpose.

It had long been rumored that Muglair betrayed the Hutman leadership to the Inta. Arland published what it claimed were informant reports obtained from the Skavian Inta detailing his treachery. He had worked secretly with the Inta regime, so it was claimed, and revealed the hiding places of the leadership to save his own life when it became clear the Inta would take a hard line. Muglair denounced these rumors as foul Arlander propaganda and took harsh measures against anyone in his domain who spread them.

After the repression Muglair assumed leadership of the Hutman cause which now pursued a policy of working within the rules of the Inta regime, abandoning the platform of revolutionary change. As Arland pressured the Skavian Inta to expand the rights of Hutmen, Muglair organized village green preservation societies, local political collectives based in Hutman villages which sent non-voting delegates to the People’s Hall in Leri Deri. As the number of societies increased the representation of Hutmen grew. It was only a matter of time before the delegates gained voting power, first in an advisory capacity and then, after the bloodless revolution, as a binding Parliament.

It was a wonder of nature that trees sloped toward the sun at just the proper angle to make a comfortable back rest. Mutt leaned against a tree and scattered seed corn to a yard full of chickens. It wasn’t feeding time. He simply enjoyed watching them scurry about. As it rose the tree curved toward the sun in a delicate balance to obtain maximum light without toppling over, its leaves tilted at an angle to receive the sun’s rays on a perpendicular.

A popular fairy tale told of a day when the sun danced in the sky on the orders of a wizard. But in fact the sun had never moved. For all eternity, as far as anyone knew, it had occupied the exact same spot in the sky, a miraculous dot of brilliance from which all life drew sustenance. Mutt placed seed on the hem of his fatigues and waited as a bobbing hen nervously approached and pecked. He then held some out in his hand but no chicken was brave enough to bob that close. Chilly marine breezes from the west were giving way to a warm Skavian breeze blowing over the edge. He loved these periods of alternating gusts which were both stimulating with the temperature fluctuations and soothing like caresses from many hands. The sweet warm wind from Skava was sometimes called dragon’s breath, but he imagined that actual dragon’s breath, if such a thing existed, would be foul.

Across the yard his childhood home spread gracefully in two wings separated by an open breezeway crowned by a gabled loft. Through the corridor he could see wisps of smoke rising from an open fire pit in the back yard. His father was turning cuts of goat meat wrapped in foil with peppers and onions. Mutt had never mastered the art of holding long-handled tongs and watched with envy as his father, tongs in each hand, effortlessly turned packages in the coals without drops. This was to be a special dinner. All the children were home for the first time in over a year, and his mother had taken leave from the session in Rixjrig for the occasion. In the kitchen she was chopping scallions and adding them to a large simmering pot. Mutt’s contribution to the feast was rhubarb pie. He had spent several hours earlier in the day with the daughter of a family friend baking the confection. He now considered it his duty to stay out of the kitchen while the remaining courses were prepared. His older brother refused to take part in the preparations at all. He sat in his childhood bedroom in the loft – preserved like a time capsule since his departure for the service three years earlier – intently sharpening a stick.

Intro
Were you disappointed by the ending to the series Lost? What follows is a story with as intricate a mythology as Lost’s but with an important difference: in the end it is all explained mechanistically, without resort to mysticism or religion. In the end the following summary of the core mystery, taken from the opening chapter, will be perfectly sensible:

The Oopsah told a story, a majestic, exalted, beatific story of the coming of the end times and the rise of the Controller. He learned how the world would end, who would destroy it, and how he, Zranga, could prevent it. He learned that he had been appointed by destiny – by the Controller himself – to carry out this mission. But above all he learned of the existence of a perfect being, the demigod Celeste, trapped beyond time in a cycle of eternal death. Only Zranga could rescue her, and to do this he had to place a giant door on the bottom of the Silent Sea, and kill the Great Man.

Read on to found out how far Ivy Morven will go to stop Tobor Zranga from realizing his destiny, and how this alternative universe is bizarrely structured so that the most rational acts are the most extreme.

Chapter 1 - Who is Celeste?

Tobor Zranga was seated on the ceiling, his gravity reversed. Through a window in the wheelhouse he could see whitecaps as the ocean roiled about the vessel. For Zranga the sea and sky were inverted, the sea forming a watery heaven, the sky falling away into an abyss. He knew that if he climbed through the window into open air he would tumble away from the planet to certain death, his body falling forever through outer space. Up and down were now relative terms, with down for him being the direction called up by the locals. It was a hostile and vertiginous world, as if he were condemned to live in a crow’s nest, teetering above an infinite void. One slip without a fastener meant a trip to oblivion, and Zranga did not like fasteners; safety devices that impeded his freedom felt like shackles and he refused to wear them.

His countrymen had a term for this condition – liquid sky – and anyone from his homeland who visited the Silent Sea without proper acclimation suffered from it. The only way to acclimate was to consume the local water and food until one’s body was composed primarily of local matter, causing gravity to pull toward earth. This was a slow and nauseating process with a disorienting period of weightlessness if one went straight from up to down skipping the horizontal directions. Dark Harbor was full of conversion spas but Zranga did not have time to reorient. Even with advance planning he would not have reoriented for he did not want to take the time away from Skava. The opportunity for intrigue in his absence was too great.

She instantly recognized the handwriting on the envelope. She didn’t even have to look at the address to know whom it was from. Her hands trembled and her heart beat faster. She knew that she shouldn’t even open the envelope. The letter itself, its words, its tone, its calligraphic schoolboy handwriting, its enchanting promises, would be toxic to her. In spite of that, she opened it anyway.

“My Sweet Karen,” it began. That opening made her feel nauseous. She imagined to how many other women he must be writing in this way. Yet the tender phrasing still brought her to tears. “I keep thinking about you,” it went on. “Not a single day goes by when I don’t miss you like hell.” ‘Like hell’ is the operative term here, Karen told herself, no longer believing him. The sugary tone reminded her of a familiar pattern. He must want something from me, she surmised. “I’ve been on my best behavior and things are looking pretty good here. In a month or so I’ll be up for my parole hearing. I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to whip up a letter of support to let these guys know that I have a solid character and that I’ve never shown any signs of violence towards you. Basically, I’ve got to prove to them that I’m not going to be a threat to society once I get out of here. That should be easy. The psychologist seems to be on my side and I’m on good terms with the prison staff. I’m asking for your help because you’re still the only woman of my life. We belong together, Baby. The sooner I get out of this joint, the quicker we can fulfill our dream of starting a life together. Who knows? Maybe soon we’ll have more than just imaginary kids. Love always, Michael.”

Karen could almost hear his melodious voice in these phrases, intermingling real requests with imaginary promises. She had fallen for his lines time and time again, even when everyone else turned against him. She recalled how sincere Michael looked on the day he avowed his innocence. “I swear to God, Karen, that I never laid a hand on Ana or on any other woman in my life. Babe, you know that I’m incapable of violence. Hurting a woman physically is the most despicable thing I’ve ever heard of! Let alone killing her. I may be a jerk and I may have cheated on you, but you know better than anyone else that I’m completely harmless.” She remembered how she had nodded in agreement. After all, Michael had never hit her and he seldom raised his voice to her during their nearly three years together.

Even when faced with all the evidence that made him appear guilty, Karen took an oath at the trial. She stood by her man, as a character witness for the defense attesting to Michael’s gentle disposition. “All they’ve got is some stupid circumstantial evidence against me. This pack of lies has been fanned by the malicious gossip of the press, which would love to crucify me. I mean, what sells better than some sordid tale about a scorned lover who shoves his girlfriend under the train, in a tragic twist reminiscent of Anna Karenina? They’re having a field day with me. But they should have read Tolstoy more carefully. Because Anna Karenina committed suicide all on her own and so did Ana Popescu,” he had scoffed at the press coverage.

“Stop playing with fire. Stay away from him.” The therapist’s words still rang in Ana’s ears as she walked back to the subway station. “The man you loved never existed,” Dr. Emmert had told her. But instead of imagining Michael’s features, Ana now envisioned those of the man who had been real all along, the man who loved her truly and had the generosity to forgive her now, when she appeared to outsiders unforgivable. She saw Rob’s caramel eyes, his smile, a little awkward and shy, his slim body, at an angle, as if not really knowing what to do with himself, a pose expressing both self-confidence and an irreducible timidity. She recalled what her husband had told her one evening, before she had met Michael, when they were sitting next to one another during a reception at a family wedding. “So many people marry and then divorce a few years later. I wonder why that happens,” Ana had casually remarked. “Sometimes it’s for legitimate reasons,” Rob had replied. “But I suspect that a lot of times it’s because they never really take themselves off the market. They go into the marriage without making a serious commitment and continue to look around, to see if they can find someone better. I hope that we’ll never do that to each other,” he looked piercingly into his wife’s eyes. Ana didn’t avert her gaze, since she had nothing to hide. She told him quite sincerely that she’d never do that herself, not knowing how close she’d come to the brink of divorce in a matter of months.

After waiting outside the building for about an hour, Michael watched Ana exit the therapist’s office, where he had followed her. Fuck the restraining order! he decided, tearing it to shreds soon after he got it. He felt like his initial intuition was confirmed. I knew it! She’s having an affair with her shrink, he speculated. Dozens of women had washed away every last trace of her. Every kiss, every caress, every ounce of desire, every shred of memory of Ana had been covered over by countless others. Yet he still felt peeved that another man had access to his woman. Because in his mind, no matter what happened, no matter how many other lovers she’d have, Ana would always be his. Lightning doesn’t strike twice. The maids won’t save her this time, he thought coolly, glancing at his watch. It was 1:05 p.m. Too early for Rob or the kids to be home, which meant that Ana would be all alone. They’d have a nice little chat together, undisturbed. He’d be sure to thank her for filing charges against him.

When she stepped into his office, Dr. Emmert could tell that Ana was unusually agitated. They had scheduled an emergency session the day before, following Michael’s attack. Somehow, Ana thought, looking around her therapist’s familiar office, the restraining order she filed against Michael didn’t seem as much of a protection as processing this event in her own mind. She didn’t sit down as usual. Instead, she paced back and forth across the room, filled to the brim with nervous energy.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” the psychiatrist suggested.

But Ana acted like she hadn’t heard him. She turned to him and announced abruptly, “I hate Michael. Last night, I dreamt of killing him.”

Dr. Emmert gazed at her without any show of surprise. “You had this dream after his last visit?”

“Yes.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it,” he motioned towards the empty chair.

Ana plopped herself down, tossing her purse on the ground with uncharacteristic carelessness. She forced a smile. “It was funny. In a sad kind of way. It would have been comical, if it weren’t so tragical, as my daughter would say. I feel so angry.”

“Was it his last visit in particular that makes you feel this way?”

Ana paused to think for a moment before answering him. “Not really. It just pushed me over the edge. But I’ve been feeling angry ever since I began to realize I was this close,” she pinched a few millimeters of air between her thumb and index finger, “to destroying my life and compromising my children’s lives for a man who isn’t even worth a second glance. His last visit sealed the deal. Now I definitely hate him.”

There was something feral in Ana’s demeanor that made the psychiatrist believe her statement. It came from the gut, from the spleen. “Passion often turns to hate. Just as love turns to indifference,” he remarked, used to dealing with broken relationships. “What did Michael do in particular to make you feel so angry with him?”

“I can’t talk to you anymore,” Ana said, without opening the door. She felt a tingling sensation, shortness of breath and a rush of adrenaline as her body kicked into combat mode.

“So all those times you said you loved me meant nothing to you? So much for living for passion and art!” Michael said with a note of reproach.

Through the rectangular glass panel on the side of the door, she could see him make a theatrical, sad face; an inverted smile like a masked figure in an ancient play. He may have wanted to appear sincere, but he looked grotesque. “What about you?” she challenged him. “Would a passionate man ask the love of his life to sign a prenup?”

“I was only trying to protect our assets. Yours too, not just mine.”

“Yeah, right! Your paws would have been all over my money while you kept the house in your name alone. Would a passionate man become stingy all of a sudden?” she continued. “I said ‘yes’ to my generous lover only to end up with Karen’s stingy fiancé!”

“Hey, it cuts both ways. You became petty too.”

“Did I also require you to wear a certain uniform for me?” Ana let out some of the bile that had been building up inside. “I didn’t appreciate being told to only wear skirts around you or how I should wait for you when you came home from school. Even my daughter has been choosing her own clothes since the age of seven. You need to buy yourself a Barbie doll if you want to play dress-up!”

If anyone had listened in on the lovers’ quarrel that had just taken place between Ana and Michael, they wouldn’t have believed that they were witnessing the end of “the love affair of the century,” which is how the two protagonists, recently turned antagonists, had previously regarded their relationship. As Ana hung up the phone, her hand trembled on the receiver.

It’s as if two Michaels existed in her mind: the one before they told their partners about the affair and the one after. A small part of her still refused to believe that the tender, affectionate, charismatic, reliable and doting lover she had known, whose stated objective in life was to make her happy— “what my Baby wants, my Baby gets”—had morphed into one of those hollow men profiled in the psychology books her therapist had recommended.

Logically speaking, the two sides of Michael, the one she had known and loved, the other she feared and despised, couldn’t be reconciled. She recalled Michael running to greet her with unbridled enthusiasm each and every time they met. Even those over-the-top romance novels couldn’t quite capture the intensity of his real life passion. The tactile memory of his touch gently exploring her body before consuming her with an insatiable hunger still sent shivers of desire up and down her spine. Michael’s patience throughout her professional struggles and emotional vacillations still attested to the depth of his feelings. The ease and comfort with which they communicated struck her as unique. And the interest he took in her art, which he not only encouraged, but also inspired, made her feel like in losing her lover, she’d be losing a soul mate.

She recalled a moving, jazzy song she used to listen to with Michael. It described a woman letting go of her lover gradually, piece by piece, trace by trace, memory by memory. She now felt like she too had to let go forever of Michael’s passionate kisses, of the way he cradled and twirled her in his arms, of his excited ‘Hey, Baby!’ greetings, of his sensual caresses, of his desirous, flattering gaze that had made her feel beautiful and feminine, and, most painfully of all, of their joint dream of a happy future together.

Of course, had he listened to that love song, Dr. Emmert would have said that it didn’t apply at all to her situation. One doesn’t let go of a psychopath piece by piece. One runs away as fast as possible in the opposite direction. That’s what Karen should have done also. She recalled a photograph Michael had shown her, which featured him and Karen on the day of their engagement.

“I love you! See you after school,” Ana kissed her son on his ruddy cheek.

“Alright, Mom,” Allen mumbled. He turned away from his mother, to indicate to his peers waiting by the bus stop that he wasn’t a mama’s boy. Although it was already spring, it was still very cold.

Ana noticed that Allen had left the house without a coat. “Are you sure you’ll be warm enough? I could run back to get you a jacket,” she offered.

“I’m sure, Mom. I’ll be fine.”

Ana got the picture, but couldn’t resist giving him one last hug right before the school bus stopped in front of them. As she waved goodbye to her son, she was overcome by the feeling that she had backed away from the edge of a precipice.

As soon as she stepped back into the house, she heard the phone ring. “Hello?”

“Hey, Baby! I’m sure glad to hear your sexy voice again,” Michael said in a light and melodious voice. “I’ve missed you like hell.”

Ana’s heart pounded as she hesitated between hanging up immediately, as she knew she should, and tying up loose ends with her former lover. “I told you it’s over between us,” she said after a slight hesitation.

Michael picked up on her ambivalence. “Why? Our fight was just a snafu. We both know what we feel for each other.”

The word “snafu” bothered Ana. “Then why did you act so casual when I broke up with you?”

“You’re dead ass wrong about that!” he sharply contradicted her. “I was in total shock.”

“Not really. You were calm and flippant about it.”

“Come on now! You know that’s how I react to bad news. I become defensive and shut down,” Michael switched tactics, granting her recollection but giving it a different spin.

The bedroom door was shut, but Karen could still hear her giggles, her half-hearted protests, his tender inducements and his grunts. They kept her up at night, like a mocking echo in her brain, making her wish that Michael would do something more drastic, something overtly brutal, so that she’d hate his guts and find the strength to leave him. Karen didn’t even know who was with him in the bedroom. She hadn’t seen the woman go in and hoped to God that she wouldn’t have to watch her leave.

The less she saw and heard and felt, the more numb and deaf and blind she became, the lesser the pain. But sometimes it was impossible to ignore all the new ways he found to hurt her. In those moments, she was almost ready to cut the perverse umbilical cord that bound her to Michael in a mixture of pleasure and pain that kept her constantly hovering on the edge of despair.

Just when she thought she had enough and could take no more, Michael would back off temporarily. He’d take her out to a fancy restaurant, or make love to her tenderly again, or tell her in that sweet melodious voice of his that he loved her more than ever and that those sluts meant nothing to him. Sometimes he’d promise her that he’d join her soon in Phoenix. There they’d live out her dream of a happy life together, which had originally been his dream, if she recalled. That’s when the unbearable would become bearable again. Until the next time she discovered traces of another woman in his in his life, in his house, in their bed. Then the whole cycle of pleasure in pain would start anew.

“I got you a little something,” Ana announced with a coy smile, extending her husband a greeting card.

Rob looked quizzingly into her eyes as he tore open the envelope. “What’s the occasion?”

She shrugged. “There isn’t one. It’s just because you’re so sweet.”

Rob didn’t know whether to be grateful or weary as he peered down at the card. It had a picture of a little kitten and a sleepy puppy with its floppy ear over the kitten’s head, protecting her underneath it like a cozy cover. The caption read, “And yet it works….” He smiled at her. “Thanks.”

Ana approached him to give him a hug, then a peck on the cheek. “You really are a good person,” she repeated and this time she meant it, unlike during the days she was planning to leave him for another man, when her husband’s good character was just an abstraction to her. Rob sensed the difference. He heard in Ana’s voice a sense of conviction, which perhaps accompanied the freshness of a new discovery, of falling in love all over again with the person you have ignored for too long. As Rob reciprocated, wrapping his arms around Ana, he felt her soft breast upon his chest and sensed her rapid heartbeat through the thin texture of their shirts.

Michael felt something tickle his back. He brushed it off with a somnolent, half-conscious gesture, but the sensation persisted. He turned over and opened his eyes. A young woman with pale blue eyes and platinum blond hair lay by his side in bed. “Morning sleepy face!” she whisked away the sheet from her body. By now fully awake, Michael’s gaze went straight to her large, semispherical silicon breasts, white as powdered milk, with protruding, rosy nipples. His mouth gravitated to one of the inviting nipples, which he suckled greedily, then to the other, so that it wouldn’t become jealous. He slid her body towards him and gestured unambiguously toward his erect member. As she was slowly, skillfully undertaking to bring him to orgasm, like trained professionals do, by using both her hand and her mouth in a synchronized, rhythmic motion, he tried, absurdly, to remember her name and how they met.

Was it “Hallie?” or “Hollie?” That sounded about right. She was his second pick up on the previous evening, as he made his rounds to the clubs. Despite the lack of adequate sleep, Michael recalled that she had mentioned something to him about being an advertising major. The one before her that evening, a cute little oriental doll whom he nailed in the parking lot near another local bar, had also been a business major. These business majors sure know how to get down to business, Michael thought, looking down at his partner. Her mouth was opened into a perfectly shaped oval, her cheeks caved in from the sucking efforts which were beginning to arouse him. “Stop!” he said, motioning her to get on all fours. At the sight of her rounded, athletic posterior and the parenthesis of her slim legs revealing a set of pinkish-gray partially unfolded lips, Michael could hardly contain himself. He quickly placed on the condom he had left on the counter. After a few deep, violent thrusts that made her whole body plunge back and forth like a piston, he exploded inside her in a sequence of diminishing spasms, releasing a series of grunts that gradually dissipated into a complacent silence. Though Hollie might have been the business major, after he was done with her, Michael was the one who became all business. He sprung from bed and hit the shower.

“What are you doing with Kitt?” Ana asked her daughter. They had purchased the 1930’s doll, complete with her art nouveau bedroom set, only last summer.

“Nothing. I’m just moving her to the basement.”

“You’re bored with her already?”

“I’ve outgrown dolls, Mama,” the girl rolled her eyes.

With her diminutive frame, large blue eyes and delicate features, Michelle herself looked like a doll. “You’re only nine years old. How could you have outgrown dolls already?” Ana objected.

Her daughter’s eyes suddenly clouded. “I’ve grown up faster this year, I guess.”

Ana blushed at the allusion. “You never let us know you were so upset.”

Michelle placed the doll on the living room sofa. She sat down next to her, a little doll and a bigger doll side by side, both with blond hair and blue eyes, only Michelle’s gaze was so much more expressive than Kitt’s. “I saw how you and Daddy were upset. I didn’t want to make you feel even worse. Besides, you were sure you wanted to leave us. There was nothing I could do about it.” Her usually sparkly voice trailed off with sadness.

“You mean leave Daddy,” Ana corrected her.

“I don’t believe psychiatrists can help unless you’re clinically insane,” Ana said to her husband as they pulled into the parking garage. “There’s a place over there,” she pointed to an empty spot.

“Then he should be able to help you,” Rob commented.

“How so?” Ana pretended not to get the unflattering innuendo. “I’ve already broken up with Michael.”

“Yeah, but if he comes to get you, which he still might since I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him yet, I’m not sure that you won’t leave me for him again. Besides, there’s so much damage this affair’s done to our marriage. We don’t really know how to fix it. If left to our own devices, we’ll just go back to ignoring each other.”

Ana directed him a skeptical glance: “And you really believe that paying a shrink two hundred bucks an hour to tell us that we’re in love with our parents will fix all our problems?”

Rob took Ana’s cool hand into his. For the first time since she could remember, he chivalrously helped her out of the car. “This isn’t just about us.” His gaze shifted nervously. “I can’t even look my own parents and colleagues in the eye, given what you’ve done to me. At least now I’ll be able to tell them that we’re making some genuine effort to work on our marriage with a professional therapist. Otherwise, I’ll look like a chump who doesn’t have the guts to break up with his two-timing wife.”

Ana contemplated her husband’s statement as they climbed down the staircase that led them out of the garage. “I didn’t think you cared so much about appearances,” she said, without masking her disappointment.

“Yeah, well, you’d care more too if you had gone through the humiliation I have. But you’re incapable of putting yourself in my shoes,” Rob reproached her.

“It’s not like your colleagues necessarily have more empathy than I do,” Ana countered. “And I feel terrible about what I did. That’s part of why I changed my mind. But, frankly, I don’t care about what your colleagues and their secretaries think,” she stuck to her original point. “Ultimately, it’s our lives, not theirs. We’d be the ones to suffer had we separated. And we’ll be the ones to suffer if we stay together and our marriage is unhappy.”

Michael parked the car in the garage. Within a few leaps, he was inside the house. “Hey,” he greeted Karen. She was sitting at the kitchen table, licking the last traces of fat free yogurt from her spoon. “Still eating only fruit and yogurt?”

“I don’t have much of an appetite lately. I might as well take advantage of that for my diet,” she got up to place the spoon into the sink.

Michael followed her tall figure with his eyes, weighing in his mind the pros and cons of what he were about to propose to her. When she turned around to face him, he saw that the area around her nose was rosy, as if she had been crying again. “Do you have a cold or something?”

Karen looked at him reproachfully. “It must be my allergies.”

Michael breathed in, as he often did when he was about to raise a point he considered particularly important. “Do you want to stop by Andrea’s?”

Karen winced at the suggestion. That was their favorite restaurant, where they used to celebrate special occasions. “Why go there now?”

“I have a surprise for you.” He looked around slyly. “But I prefer to reveal it somewhere special.”

“What is it?” Karen asked, without much enthusiasm. She had had more than enough surprises from Michael lately.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he took her by the hand and led her out the door.

She followed him blindly. “What kind of a surprise?” she asked him again once they stepped into his car.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, now would it?”

introduction

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I used to love reading print newspapers. In 2004, when I started working at the New York Times, I was excited beyond words to discover that much of the Sunday Times was printed ahead of time and a stack of those early- run papers arrived at the Times building every Saturday. Not only did I work at one of the most respected newspapers in the world, but along with a paycheck, I also got the magazine, the Week in Review, the Metro section, and Sunday Business several hours before the rest of the world!

“When are you planning to move in with Michael?” Rob asked his wife, perturbed by the fact that their separation was dragging on in no-man’s land, neither still married nor clearly heading for divorce.

“Never,” Ana replied.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I broke up with him,” she announced.

Oh God, this can’t be happening to me! Rob thought. I had just gotten over the hump, used to the idea of divorce. “Why in the world would you do that now?”

Ana noticed that her husband sounded anything but pleased with the news. “Something’s gone terribly wrong. I don’t know what’s come over Michael. He’s like a whole different person from the man I fell in love with.”

“Not really,” Rob disagreed. “He’s the same person who cheated on, lied to, manipulated and then dumped his fiancée once he got tired of her and got a hold of you. The love of your life. Everything you’ve ever wanted in a man. Ideal lover… right… You were so blind, it made me sick! This guy gets more ass than a freaking toilet seat!”

“Please. You don’t need to launch into a character assassination of him.”

“There’s nothing to assassinate since he’s got no character,” Rob retorted.

“Just remember that Michael’s also been under a lot of pressure lately,” she reminded him.

I can’t believe she’s still defending that jerk! Rob fumed. “The poor guy… After he deceived and manipulated everyone. Now I’m supposed to feel sorry for him?”

“Nobody’s asking you to feel sorry for anybody.” The moment didn’t feel right. But when would it feel better? After a slight hesitation, she gathered the nerve to ask him: “Do you still want me to leave?”

“I’m not going to throw you out into the street,” he circumvented her real question. He wished he had the strength to tell her that it was too late; that they had reached the point of no return. But would it be true? he wondered, still feeling divided.

“Would you like me to rent an apartment?” she reformulated her question, sensing ambivalence.

On the following morning, Ana called Michael to set up a meeting with him. “I had a nightmare about us last night,” she said as soon as she saw him, her eyes anxiously seeking his for signs of concern.

The look she saw in his eyes, however, was one of voracious desire. “You and all your worries. Get in the car!” he opened the door for her.

Ana didn’t step in, however. “We need to talk,” she insisted.

Michael’s desire morphed into impatience. “About what?” Ever since Ana had spilled the beans to her husband, she needed his reassurance ten times a day. He hadn’t had so many damn “us conversations” with Karen in three years as he’d had with his girlfriend during the past three weeks.

“My love, don’t be annoyed with me,” Ana pleaded. “We’ve been going through a tough time lately. Please remember that my situation’s more complicated than yours.”

Michael looked away, to contain his mounting irritation. “How many times have I heard this sob story already?”

“It’s not a sob story, Michael. It’s our lives.” Ana walked over to cling to him, hoping that their physical contact could somehow translate into emotional intimacy, as before.

“What is it that you want from me?” he asked her, exasperated.

“A little empathy.”