The girl did not particularly care for his face, but she noticed that his hands were clean, tiny, and devoid of any calluses. The boy could feel her breathing on his neck and could smell the ivory soap on the girl and the lavender in the air. He began riding down an unfamiliar path with the Enflamed Mountain in the distance, red and hovering and ugly.

He hoped they might name the mountain after him one day, if he managed to do something heroic or memorable. He could be remembered for his stolen collection of goods, or for his soft unsoiled hands.

The girl held onto the boy’s ivory suit and then began stroking underneath his un-tucked shirt, under his wife-beater, and onto his curved back. While she rubbed he began speaking to her, telling her a story about a talking fish and about preparing lentils for the new year. It was not meant to be funny, but she laughed, she felt it would be rude not to laugh.

They arrived at the home. It was old but beautiful and the color of a peach. The boy noticed the opened windows and a pair of thin curtains blowing in and out. The smell of the river reached them, the smell was strong, the boy thought this immediately, but he did not say it aloud, he felt it would be rude to say so. He thought it again and again: a smell like mud.

They took off their leather shoes at the front door. They went immediately to the bed, passing the kitchen, the thin curtains, and the yellow kitchen wall with its drops of red red red, red. The pair sat on the mattress. They laid upon the mattress with their bare feet on white cotton sheets. They rubbed their bare feet together. The boy told the girl about all the objects he had gathered over the years, so many of them, a large collection of items. This recounting lasted for hours.

The girl could not help her disinterest. When he paused to take a breath between the listing of watches and coins and hammers, she interrupted. The girl told him about her sister and the helicopter. She told him about her preoccupation with the white men, their thoughtlessness, their flat hair, and their inevitable extinction.

They talked to one another, but really only to themselves:

My sister’s nose is prone to bleeding, you know, but helicopters are very safe, very safe, everyone knows this, but the white men do not, they don’t know how to pay attention; that is why they are dying—

I like to feel the heaviness of the object, which is why I collect things. The weight of the watches and the coins, the jewelry and the perfume bottles, and for my hands to be filled with many objects at once. I try to guess their weight, and their value. My room is filled with such things, filled to the brim—