But of course it wasn’t true. For at least fifteen minutes I’d lie there ragged and lifeless while cross-legged and bare-assed on the couch beside me sat my inexhaustible symbiont. Gravely and patiently she sat, like a good wife awaiting my recrudescence, dry-firing her gun, sipping a Diet Coke. Then we’d collide again, a couple of acrobats coupling on the couch, the earthen floor, the tack table. Nothing could keep me from her, from pawing and pouncing and plugging her gaps, not even when she wore jumbo pinks in her hair.

I knew she would respond to any man so long as he was ithyphallic; still (such was my selective blindness), she was a bundle of charm. A darling, dirty-minded, filthy-tongued scamp, a gem carver bent on sculpting the perfect fuck. The more explosive bodily functions were always on her mind. “How are you?” I greeted her one evening, in bland conformity to custom. “Had a pretty good day,” she replied, “didn’t get fucked but sneezed twice.” I came to expect that sort of touching, uncalculated revelation; it was only when she resorted to the patois of suburbia that she surprised me. “How can you drink that stuff?” I once asked as she drained yet another Diet Coke and sucked the bottom of the can. “It’s conducive to my own personal lifestyle,” she said.

What could be said about my own lifestyle, except that it was random and unruly? The nights with Dawnette, expanding the frontiers of human endurance. The days riding the range, rooting out locoweed, sprawling, sometimes sleeping in the saddle. Dawnette, between the more pressing exercises that brought us together, had insisted on carrying out her contract with Quillet, and so I had learned, squeamishly, the rudiments of horsemanship. But nature never intended me to become a cowboy. There dawned a shuddersome day when destiny, bored or perhaps shamed with what had become of me, intruded.

Quillet stood in the center of the stable and eyed Fritillary, the alpha mare of his herd. He puffed on his pipe, a monument of profundity. “She’s in estrus,” he said. “I think she’s ready.”

“How can you tell?” I asked warily. Already I knew that no good could come of this.

“See how she urinates? And switches her tail and holds it to one side?” Puff, puff. “I’ll phone old Mrs. White and have Dawnette bring over the stud in the morning. You and your mother can oversee the operation.”

“I don’t think I can do it,” Mother said limply.

“I know I can’t,” I said emphatically.

“It could be dangerous,” Mother said.

“Don’t be absurd,” Quillet said between puffs. “I’d do it myself, but copy’s piling up, there’s a deadline to meet, I got those back spasms again…” A facial nerve twitched, as if to certify his infirmity. “All you’ve got to do,” he went on bravely…

“No,” said Mother.