Ruth took a seat on the back porch. How long should she wait before she called Sheriff Siggy? The sun had almost set. Fifty-Three lay at her feet and began a loud liquid licking of his body.

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she open herself up to others? She thought of poor Goldwin, who had courted her briefly before she met Oliver. Goldwin was the first man she had dated in almost four years. She knew immediately that it was absurd—a forty-six-year-old lifelong bachelor. She wasn’t in the least attracted to him, with his fleshy hangdog features and his obsessive fussing with those thin strands of dyed black hair, greased and swept so carefully over his bald crown. It was as if he considered his scalp something so obscene that the possibility of its exposure was the stuff of nightmare, his thick blind fingers constantly reaching up to make sure he was decent. (She tried to resist that snaky cruelty uncoiling itself inside her.) He was sweet, really, bought her flowers and chocolates. On their fourth date, he gave her a polished granite brooch that had belonged to his mother, which she politely refused. Why hadn’t she told him then that it wasn’t going to work out? She was lonely, that was part of it, frightened of becoming nothing. And curious to have herself mirrored in a man again as something desirable, to try to catch glimpses in his surface of a woman who had once been able to give and receive pleasure. What was she now, spending so much time here on this porch, taking in the sky, the barn against the sky, the sky behind the catalpas? Little more than a crude receptor, a coarsely articulated spine, to conduct, vaguely, the soft trembling of a deeper life. The alternative—ingestion, excretion, sex, reproduction, age, sickness, dying—she found horrifying, absurd; summed up in the sound of Fifty-Three licking his genitals. But she loved Fifty-Three. And for all her ascetic posturing, it required so little—Haig’s letter—for her to produce that foul language, the squid shot of ink.

The one mirror she had in her home had become a reproach. A personal ghost, created from all she had improperly felt, haunted her reflection. And did so more and more as age made her face increasingly tenable. At one time she had no face, nothing to haunt, because she had been, if not beautiful exactly, flawlessly attractive. One former boyfriend, whenever she entered a room of people, would exclaim, “Ah, the main course has arrived.” And her face would be devoured, one of the few consistently emptied plates in the great potluck of society. What was she now? Ruth smiled. No longer the fried chicken, she was the raw broccoli and mayonnaise salad, the mysterious fish dip. She could bring her face home untouched each time and freeze it for the next gathering.