Two hours later, after more coffee had been made and consumed, after the dog had been settled into a makeshift bed of old blankets, the postcards acknowledged but not explained, and the stacks of books on the coffee table and on the floor lightly browsed and casually rearranged; after the two bodies had noticed without comment their near-identical size and weight, their symmetrical arms and kindred hair, their wardrobe similarities and their identically groomed nails; after each had put a hand down the other’s pants; after one had brought the other’s finger up and bitten it, hard; after the woodstove had been stoked and eggs had been scrambled and devoured, E looked across the table at S. “I can’t figure out what you look like,” she said. “I can see you, but I can’t picture you. What’s that about?” And S said, “It’s O.K., I don’t need to be pictured. There are other things I need.” And the sun emerged from behind a cloud and they decided to take the dog out for a walk.

THE NEWS REPORTS

Some facts may have been misrepresented, or misleadingly described.

The mail did cease to arrive, but only for two days. It was unprecedented, but then quickly normalized into a glitch. The post office issued a terse statement arguing, in effect, that they’ d had a pretty good run of neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night and that, with the budget cuts, the dominance of internet communication, increased competition from private carriers, and the declining health of their aging workforce (the number of postal workers shot or killed by dogs had doubled annually for the last five years; the young underemployed couldn’t be enticed to join), they would continue to reserve the right to pause service in localized areas when acts of God rendered delivery virtually impossible.

There is a version of this story in which the city where Love once met—the city in which the apartment across from the café, the bodega, and the playground is situated—is underwater, in chaos, a battleground or a breeding ground or a mass grave. You wanted a story, and that would have been a good one, ripe with analogies to our present age, rich with interpretables, a litmus test for those who read it, distributing them (whether or not they were aware that their deepest responses to the narrative, the ones that protest or agree with a character’s reaction to a situation of threat, distribute them thus) along the temperamental continuum from stasis-preserving to experimental, the reformers and the burners-to-the-ground. It would have helped us, perhaps, imagine the actual future for which we are more or less bound, though without knowing when.

But that isn’t what’s happened, what’s happening here.