“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” the optician said.

“Not much left to the rest of your life, is there?” the voices asked. “Hardly worth the trouble, is it?”

“You have to climb the tree to pick the best fruit,” the optician said, and the voices answered: “And the tree falls the minute the rotten optician reaches its crown.”

The optician’s pace was now very slow. The leather bag no longer bumped against his hip. His heart no longer drummed in his rib cage. The voices hummed the theme music and whispered, “We’re bankrupt,” and “Matthew is not your son.”

“Shut up,” the optician said. “Please.”

Selma was sitting in front of her house and she saw the optician climbing the hill. She stood up and walked toward him. The dog sitting at her feet walked with her. It was just a puppy, but you could already see it would be huge one day, so huge that the optician wondered if it really was a dog and not some enormous, as-yet-undiscovered kind of land mammal.

“What are you mumbling?” Selma asked.

“I was just singing,” the optician said.

“You look pale, but don’t worry, you’re definitely not the one,” Selma said, even though she had no idea whom the dream intended, of course. “Nice suit, but it’s not getting any younger. What was it you were singing?”

The optician shifted his bag to the other hip and said, “We’re bankrupt.”

Selma cocked her head, squinted, and peered at the optician’s face like a dermatologist examining a particularly unusual mole.

Silence had fallen inside the optician. His inner voices had gone quiet, silent in the certainty that nothing would go wrong now.

It was silent inside the optician except for one sentence. It was a sentence that spread throughout his insides like spilled paint, a sentence that radiated weakness so powerfully it seemed to the optician as if all his muscles were melting, as if all the hair on his head that hadn’t yet turned gray would do so immediately, as if the leaves on the trees around him and Selma would immediately wilt and the trees themselves collapse, exhausted by the sentence spreading through him; it seemed to him as if birds would fall from the sky, their wings paralyzed by the sentence, as if the legs of cows in the pasture would suddenly buckle and the three words inside the optician would lull to sleep the dog standing next to Selma—and it was a dog, what else could it be? Everything is wilting, the optician thought to himself, everything is shriveling, collapsing, falling down, and crumbling because of the sentence: “No, better not.”

AN AS-YET-UNDISCOVERED LAND MAMMAL

The dog had appeared last year on Selma’s birthday. My father had given Selma a book of photographs of Alaska and said with a wink: “There’s another surprise coming.”