“Uh, Jessie, please get dressed, um, would you love?” Making a show of looking for his comb which is, as usual, lost, suspect is known as a notorious ctenophile…

The driver of the huge, loud lorry now tries to get Roger’s attention, the other midgets crowding at the windows calling, “Hey! Hey!” and emitting oily, guttural laughs. Their leader speaks English with some liquid, unspeakably nasty European accent. Lot of winking and nudging up there now, too: “Meester! Ay, zhu! Wet a meeneh’, eh?” More laughter. Roger in the rearview mirror sees English cop-faces pink with rectitude, red insignia leaning, bobbing, consulting, turning sharply now and then to stare ahead at the couple in the Jaguar who’re acting so—“What are they doing, Prigsbury, can you make it out?”

“Appears to be a man and a woman, sir.”

“Ass.” And it’s out with the black binoculars.

Through rain… then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself in a chair, old-fashioned bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds… .

Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by—is it the moon, or some other light from the sky? just the hard chair, empty now, in the very clear night, and this cold light coming down… .

The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful… but she’s snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck all at once so—why there it is right there, the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten’s. She kisses him up and down the sour salt reach of skin that’s taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning, kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending.