Professor Ranji looked startled; he blinked his eyes slowly. “Don’t tell me you take all that biblical folklore word by word?

“No, no, no, of course I don’t … word by word …” I twisted my braid around my wrist until it hurt.

“Every civilization made up stories to explain natural phenomena, you know. That does not mean even they took them literally. You know that? Science has the strength to admit what it doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean we’ve proved God does or does not exist, but a bearded man in the sky looking down at us sounds a lot like what humans would invent.”

I felt tears swelling in my eyes and looked down. His wedding ring was blurry. So every cell of my flesh was irrevocably made, to feed, to consume, to engulf. Individually, they shimmered, I could feel them starting up one by one, tingling for his own tasty cells, their protoplasmic sauce of life. I imagined boiling an eye of his, white and brown spotted like a billiard ball. The moral dam holding the current back for so long was weakening, as were my legs. Professor Ranji sensed a metamorphosis.

“And the second question?” he asked, making it a point not to blink his eyes.

I took in a deep breath, “If what you say about evolution is true, my ancestors are carnivorous reptiles?”

“What we refer to as ancestors are usually the preceeding generations of the same species. But yes, all life has derived from the earliest forms of life.”

I found myself shifting my hips slowly from left to right.

“Perhaps we can have a bite to eat together and talk about this more?” he asked.

My heart thumped so, for adult ways were yet unfamiliar to me.

I struggled to keep my voice steady, “Do you like meringue?”

CHAPTER 16

A shopping cart partially barred the aisle. Cantaloupe melons were marked down half price. I rolled them to the side, disrupting a few sleepy flies until I found one at the bottom, a pale sphere whose wrinkly skin I could pinch. I fingered the damp bruises. Cantaloupes have no natural division like apricots, where two flabby cheeks swell on each side. My thumbnail was long and extremely hard, for it had three coats of red varnish. With it, I slit open a provisional crack. Mociùté’s buttocks lost a thin liquid I caught with my tongue tip. I dropped the cantaloupe into my shopping cart.

A butcher looked down at a slab of flesh and, like an artist, executed planes, abstract blocks of meaning, carefully removing frames of white fat. His working biceps, bulging and slackening, distorted his mermaid tattoo; sometimes she was more woman, at others, more fish.

“May I help you, Miss?”

“Yes, would it be possible to have a rump roast?”

“Sure.”

“With some fur on it, please?”

“Sorry?”

“I said with some fur on it, preferably white with a large black spot.”

“Fur?”

“The fur only has to be on one side, if the rump roast is too deep a cut, give me something along the back bone.”