I studied her for a moment. She looked skinnier than ever, frail and sort of weathered. I didn’t believe her. Besides, I had known John Head a long time. He pedaled as much crank as his brother could cook. I didn’t see him giving that up, and if he was still dealing, he was still smoking.

We ate the curd on toast, on crumpets, on scones, and over ice cream. I ate a spoonful a day, and I washed my face with it. I read ​Plumbing for Dummies ​and Mama helped me detach the water main so we could fill the bathroom pipes with lemon curd. Eventually, I showered in lemon and washed my hands with lemon and bathed in it once a week. It was as if I was back in Grandma’s kitchen, immersed in lemony nirvana.

Shaking my head, most people tell their story sober, Kat. With arms folded, slide my hands back and forth on leopard-skin. Next, remove beanie and mittens, place them under the wooden lectern, chin up, and stare into the crowd.

My arm, if reached straight out from our balcony, could split the Sedef Island across in half. So I did, with wrath. I smashed on the lightless island. I broke my arm.

The next morning a sane and happy man emerged from the closet, showered, breakfasted and went to unlock the large workshop that is attached to our house. His employees arrived and they began to put the final touches on what has been Greg’s principle scientific project for some time.

For somebody who’d woken up in a near-stranger’s bed after a night of drinking, Vahid had surprising enthusiasm for the unexpected, grotesque task. Hunched half-naked over a realistic-looking corpse, its steel frame and latex skin shuddering against his ankles, he clicked at the teeth with his thumbs the way most handle routine texting. In less than one minute, he had five teeth in the correct order. 

Home, the front door locked, Justin gnaws on a carrot. He hides the girls’ Easter baskets. Justin places eggs inside every room—several contain clues as to the baskets’ whereabouts—before, out back, double-checking to make sure the privacy fence is locked, he arranges the rest, tossing the carrot near the gate. All is still and good. Tomorrow will largely be terrible, but the morning will be fun.  

Blue wears a leather-fringed tank while she dances, while she does the shimmy-shimmy-cocoa-bop in the living room. She closes her eyes and jumps up and down in time to the K-pop cranking from our tinny speakers. She swings her hips and tosses her hair. From across the room, I see her scars.

“I can't think that way. I fight thinking that way,” Liz said. “I'd go crazy otherwise. I want someone to be with and get along with and have someone want to be with me and get along with me. It's supposed to be like that, Billy. It's not too much to ask that life should make some sense.”

My coworkers go crazy over the eagles. On my break I sit outside the building and people take photos and ask questions. It feels good to be noticed. I let a kid pet one of the eagles and it screeches at him. He jumps backwards. Gets a big laugh.

As he stared out the window absent-mindedly taking in the scene, a single red balloon rose and ascended out of view. Then, a few seconds later, several more passed, this time of yellow, blue, and green. Robert stood, but his movement was interpreted as an effort to leave, and as he rose, so too did several of his family members, ready to amicably prolong his departure. He made a move for the window, but his mother was quick to obstruct the path. 

They imagine what would happen if they climbed aboard a spacecraft and drifted out into the vacuum of beautiful dark, and let their minds wander towards the fantasy of finding a perfectly lonely planet to take stock in. The Pams tells themselves to stay focused and add cooking spray to the clean sheet of paper. 

It was a free trial of Star Wars Galaxies. He should’ve just waited till he got home. Instead he logged on to an external server from inside the Department of Justice and spent two hours roaming the Dantooine countryside as “Darth Laser.” It was the name Mark used when he played Star Wars as a kid and now it was going to be officially entered into his record.

I had nothing much left except for this job. Well on my way to becoming a master of these monsters but that’s just all that they were. Monsters. Even after being caught they still fought you tooth and nail. Electrocution, drowning, even suffocation in a tornado of fallen leaves just a few potential side effects in facing these beasts.

Hours later, Erik Estrada arrived with entourage in tow, a collection of guys in Hawaiian shirts and sandals. Despite his age, the wrinkles about his eyes could not be seen in this light, nor could you notice his sagging midsection. If only the same could be said for me.  

Bob was on his back in the sand, holding a balled-up neckerchief and applying pressure to the gunshot wound below his left hip. We kneeled around him. Keisha pulled out a flashlight, and Mariah rolled her sleeves up to the elbow. Louis got a needle and thread out of his pack. 

“I know what happens in the next scene Thomas.  And all the other scenes.  They’re just diversions to keep you from thinking about the pointlessness of it all. Like an Anderson movie.  See he gets it, that’s why his movies don’t make any sense, they only make you think they do. “

Our old pals lounged on the bench overlooking the water. It wasn’t hard to tell they were there. The air warped in striations where they were present, like looking at water boil up close. Sometimes, the air took on the colour of soap in a puddle, a psychedelic swirling rainbow. Staring at them for too long was like trying to keep an eyelid open in water. 

Colin Winters didn’t perform badly. This was my second section of composition, and he’d apparently taken in enough to repeat the lesson he’d sat through earlier. I watched from the back of the room as he repeated my words, my hand gestures, the notes I’d written on the board. When Lenin Diaz’s cellphone chirped, as it does at least a couple of times each class, Colin Winters lifted it out of his hand before the kid could answer.