“Ah, she’s . . . she lives fast, she can’t change . . . con altuda, with height? Or maybe it means something else, like, going as high as you can, anyway, she’s going to die young,” I finished, lamely. The rest of the lyrics were one long Spanishy blur.

“Well bust my buttons.” Doug seemed happy with even that much translation. He hopped out of the hammock. Today he wore a hoodie and jeans, a ball cap and sneakers. He was too old to be dressing like a skateboarder. “You are the most useful girl. Come here. Show you something.”

He told me to take his place in the hammock, which I did, though it made me feel like an idiot. From here, he said, there was a view of the bay. Yes there was, past the marching rooftops. A piece of blue water against the blue sky. “Wow,” I said, dutifully, then got myself out again.

“You ready to work? Excellent. Show her where the coffee is,” he said to Jonathan, who led me over to a side of the room that had been outfitted as a small kitchen. I poured a mug for myself, and Jonathan told me that Doug took his coffee with extra cream. My first job in po biz. Coffee girl.

Under another skylight was a big table with stacks of the actual magazine, Compass Points. “The finished product,” Doug said, handing me one, rocking a little on his heels.

It was about the size of a phone book for a medium-sized town, with a glossy cover. The cover was black, with some jagged shapes in different colors scattered here and there, like broken Easter eggshells.

“This is where we do the Lord’s work,” Doug said, which I understood was meant as a joke. “We get submissions from all over the country. All over the world, really. You can imagine how important it is for writers to find readers. Imagine somebody sitting alone at a desk, practically writing in blood—that’s how it feels sometimes—they send us a poem and they get a response. They get validation.”

I imagined that most of them got a rejection, but Doug’s phone rang just then, and we didn’t have to get into such fine points. The phone call took Doug across the room. I sat down with my copy to take a look.

There was a title page, and a table of contents, and a list of the magazine staff. Doug was Doug McGregor, editor-in-chief, and there were other names that didn’t mean anything to me, nor did the names of contributors, though I hadn’t expected to know any of them. I opened the magazine in the middle and started to read.

The kiss of the sun. Grow old with me.

The fleur de lis on your shoulder

The tortoise and his friend

All on the very edge of falling

into dysfunction