“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask why you’re defacing that book?”

“I don’t know, can you? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but why ask me?” the man said. Turning his back to her, he hunched over the picture book again.

Which was really too much. She had once been a child. She owned a library card. She opened up her shoulder bag and took a needle out of the travel sewing kit. She palmed the needle and then, after finishing off her Rum and Rum and Coke—a drink she’d invented in her twenties and was still very fond of—she jabbed the man in his left buttock. Very fast. Her hand was back in her lap and she was signaling the bartender for another drink when the man beside her howled and sat up. Now everyone was looking at him. He slid off his bar stool and hurried away, glancing back at her once in outrage.

There was a drop of blood on the needle. She wiped it on a bar napkin.

At a table nearby three women were talking about a new pocket universe. A new diet. A coworker’s new baby; a girl born with no shadow. This was bad, although thank God not as bad as it could have been, a woman—someone called her Caroline—was saying. A long, lubricated conversation followed about over-the-counter shadows—prosthetics, available in most drugstores, not expensive and reasonably durable. Everyone was in agreement that it was almost impossible to distinguish a homemade or store-bought shadow from a real one. Caroline and her friends began to talk of babies born with two shadows. Children with two shadows did not grow up happy. They didn’t get on well with other children. You could cut a pair of shadows apart with a pair of crooked scissors, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. By the end of the day the second shadow always grew back, twice as long. If you didn’t bother to cut back the second shadow, then eventually you had twins, one of whom was only slightly realer than the other.