“Avoid heavy foods—these may cause corns,” the doctor said in summation. “Drink water, but never the poison that is orange juice. Use fatted soap,” he added, fingering a magazine, glancing at it.

As Frances left the office, she looked back at Palmer, who picked up a pale glass marble from his desk, examining it carefully, as if for wens.

* * *

Atop her bicycle, Frances passed near the border of Little-Munson, gazing at the open wiring of its buildings and car parts strewn across a lot. A smart collection of hoses lay in an adjacent lot. Little-Munson, so tiny, so dependent on Munson for its goods, sheriffs, and other essentials, sported only one unnamed main street, with a few other dusty streets intersecting it. At night, a cloudy orange glow from lights above an abandoned gasworks made the town look fiercer, larger than it was. A low, long building like a bunker ran the length of the main street, extending into the sand dunes beyond Little-Munson’s limits, where yellow hills amounted to little more than a smallish desert that was nonetheless damp during many months of the year. Frances thought she heard a yelp from within the bunkerlike building: she knew that folks lived inside.

As a tradition, most Munson folks had no interest in Little-Munson residents, and few in Little-Munson had the desire to seek out their Munson neighbors, either. It was as if each town preferred to deny that the other existed. But once, Ray had had a friend, Happy Jaine, who occasionally worked in front of Munson’s only bakery, and oddly, he had hailed from Little-Munson. The bakery itself was well-known throughout Munson, yet, in a way, it was never enjoyed wholeheartedly, for while its main office was located in Munson, its ovens were situated in a building that actually sat upon the Munson/Little-Munson boundary. Happy in particular did not like this, because he always wanted to forget Little-Munson.

In those days, Happy lived full-time in Munson and swept bread crumbs, seeds, and other debris from the bakery’s pavement; he was an elfin, social, tidy man with knoblike knees and a full grin above his broom. Once, in her first year with Ray, Frances had been feeling outgoing, and as she had passed Happy near the bakery, she clipped him on the shoulder rather hard, then smiled such that Happy Jaine immediately led her behind the bakery’s oven-building, over a guardrail, and into a meadow crowded with torn bags and a colony of rabbits. Frances was wary of Happy, who remained silent; she stepped carefully, for she was accustomed to rabbits, though she did not care for their long minutes of stillness or brindled bodies.