Valerie pointed a slim finger to the smudged and questionable page. I leaned toward it, her, my God our shoulders were touching. Still I managed to get my eyes back in focus.

That’s when I met two new girlfriends

[I read]. One of them was Cindy. She

was weird and Nancy. We climbed a

mountain. Some of the girls climbed

down. I was one of the some.

I showed her how to fix it. “Thanks,” she said. She pulled up a leg of her jeans and licked an adorable scab on her knee.

“Could I do that for you?”

“What? Usually I’m pretty good with words,” she confided. “When I look up a word in the dictionary the same day I never have to look it up again. But,” she went on, “I’m not as good as you are.” It wasn’t a compliment, the way she said it, but a realistic evaluation of the evidence at hand. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I let it pass—the intimation that despite my syntactic skills I was still a child. “I don’t know,” I said airily. “Maybe I’ll star in a porno flick. What do you want to be?”

“Me? Nothing.”

I furrowed my brow critically. The response was not totally lost on her.

“Hell,” she said, “there’s a lot of nice people who don’t work.” Her wayward loyalty to the pariahs of the Hebraic-Protestant ethic was, I thought, admirable. “What I like,” she went on, “is to just let things happen. Just let ’em fall into place, you know? Instead of trying to like direct them.”

It had been my experience that things, given half a chance, fell chaotically out of place. However, “I agree with you totally,” I said. From behind the wall of his paper, Grady tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress something between a snort and a snicker, and sank deeper into his chair.

Valerie stared gravely at the curtain shielding Grady from us a few feet away. Calmly, leisurely, she took from a pocket a book of matches. She stretched full out on the floor, struck the match, touched the flare to the spine of the paper. I watched the cremation in a catatonic frenzy, gawking at the burst of orange flame, at Grady flying upward among the sparks, then stomping the conflagration to embers. The whole room reeked; by the time the dead flakes curled blackly across the floor, he was gasping and she was gone.

Jesus. I spent the rest of the evening, of course, thinking about my little incendiary. About her fractured, inspired syntax. She was weird and Nancy… Her slither across the rug to firebomb Grady. I wondered what next, how I’d manage to see her again. And when, the following afternoon, I ventured to the window of my cell—Glory be to God there she was, swinging through the woods with long coltish strides, wrapped in a low-lying mist, wading through blood-red leaves, kicking at pinecones. She picked up a rock and threw it: a flutter, a flash, and a rabbit, swift as a wind-up toy, bolted through the bosk and disappeared like an illusion. With the speed of the rabbit I plunged down the stairs.