A young mother passes by talking to her little girl who is really too small to be able to talk, but she’s talking anyway and very excitedly to her mother about something. I can’t quite make out what she is saying because she’s so little.

I mean, this is a tiny kid.

Then her mother answers her to explode my day with a goofy illumination. ‘It was a high building in Singapore,’ she says to the little girl who enthusiastically replies like a bright sound-colored penny, ‘Yes, it was a high building in Singapore!’

An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film

People cannot figure out why he is with her. They don’t understand. He’s so good-looking and she’s so plain. ‘What does he see in her?’ they ask themselves and each other. They know it’s not her cooking because she’s not a good cook. About the only thing that she can cook is a halfway decent meat loaf. She makes it every Tuesday night and he has a meat loaf sandwich in his lunch on Wednesday. Years pass. They stay together while their friends break up.

The beginning answer, as in so many of these things, lies in the bed where they make love. She becomes the theatre where he shows films of his sexual dreams. Her body is like soft rows of living theatre seats leading to a vagina that is the warm screen of his imagination where he makes love to all the women that he sees and wants like passing quicksilver movies, but she doesn’t know a thing about it.

All she knows is that she loves him very much and he always pleases her and makes her feel good. She gets excited around four o’clock in the afternoon because she knows that he will be home from work at five.

He has made love to hundreds of different women inside of her. She makes all his dreams come true as she lies there like a simple contented theatre in his touching, thinking only of him.

‘What does he see in her?’ people go on asking themselves and each other. They should know better. The final answer is very simple. It’s all in his head.

The Scarlatti Tilt

‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

The Wild Birds of Heaven

I’d rather dwell in some dark holler

where the sun refuses to shine,

where the wild birds of heaven

can’t hear me when I whine.

—Folk Song