I tilted my head back. The air moved out but not in through the skylight, and the peach velvet chaise was hot and I was sweating where it touched me, and I realized it took up too much room in the apartment, and seemed to take up some of the air as well and breathe out something useless, and yet I loved it. And I loved Sam, whose other names I did not yet know, and the crunch of the cookies and the fizzle of the grape soda, my unfashionable refreshments.

The fly lifted and buzzed, wavered between indistinguishable, alternative surfaces, touched lightly on my solid possessions, and moved over them, leaving his inevitable spore.

Now I own goldfish and am mean about flies. Yet our first encounter was on a real day such as these that still begin with the same glimmers, and there are no ends to the lengths that a scaled body might lead me to. Sam brought the clouds down and tickled them until they gave sarsaparilla. I drank it up and hated the hours when we were not together.

The sun was giving up and the skylight failing and he got up and brushed the crumbs from his knees and told me to come out to the college the next night and he’d feed me in Commons. It was obvious that he liked me, a distressing reaction to a woman with my intentions. But I would not give up entirely. I stood in the doorway with my hip tilted against the jamb and said goodbye with my smokiest laugh.

But we became friends, Sam and I. I gave up being sultry and lapsed into the norm. His way of liking someone was to glorify them past recognition. Mine was a maliciously cheerful phenomenology. I can’t claim we were ever crucial to each other, no. But we each served the other’s occasional purposes.