Before dusk, Dr. Timberland turned on a jet sprinkler to water his square of grass, and sometimes in the manoeuvre to keep the jet perfectly within the boundaries, wet himself. In the evening, he went to check his mail in the clubhouse and dispose of his garbage. Otherwise he stayed at home and, from what I could see, did nothing in particular besides mark papers and watch television. I know all this because I’d been following him around for over a week.

Actually, there were a few things I found unusual, going through his garbage. He went through quantities of chicken broth cubes, maybe ten cubes per day. This tortured my imagination. Everyday I found a gardenia browning at the petals. And almost daily I found an empty bottle of medication for a Miss Paulina Craft, sleeping pills, diverse painkillers. Her name wasn’t on his mailbox, neither was “Mr. and Mrs. Timberland”. Could “Miss Paulina Craft” be the maiden name of his wife? Was he the one taking her pills? Or was he just throwing the bottles out one by one? Because she’d left him? Was he a widower? I didn’t understand. Besides that, he was a normal bachelor.

It was late afternoon. The sun cast a yellow light over the mobile home park. Dr. Timberland was lowering a tin awning, noisy as thunder, over a window that was never lit. I hadn’t even begun to approach him, when an insurmountable fear, the kind that slithers up behind you at the onset of dusk, attacked me in broad daylight. My heart beat fast and hard, as if I were about to die.

I’d been brewing him too long in my mind, twisting and turning him, sampling him until he’d taken on unrealistic proportions: the finest, rarest bit, the only portion that could bring me my every happiness. I didn’t know yet how self-defeating a one-track hunger could be. Craving for strawberries, one forgets raspberries and blackberries.

I sat down behind someone’s tool-shed. A lizard eyed me suspiciously from it. I waited until Dr. Timberland cut a gardenia and sunk his nose into it.

“Dr. Timberland?”

If he looked up with a pleasant enough smile, exposing his infantile teeth, his face fell unsympathetically as soon as he recognized me; maybe he had been expecting someone else, Miss Paulina Craft to come home; maybe it had to do with the dress I was wearing; it was too short. I had told myself I was overdoing it when I’d bought it from the second-hand store, but I thought he’d like it because it was made out of a synthetic stuff, the fur of an animal that didn’t really exist. I had blackened the contours of my eyes, grown my fingernails to twice their original length, covered them with three coats of red varnish, shaved the hairs off my legs for the first time, just for him. I was so nervous, I held myself as if I were cold, which was unlikely in my attire; I felt my face sweating; the pressure of my arms against my sides made my breasts swell out of the furry V-neck, but even this didn’t appetize him; he glanced down at them with distaste. I was losing all my self-confidence. I could hardly speak. I should never have trusted my voice, it had all the nervousness of premeditation trying to sound spontaneous.