I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality: the road narrower than I thought, the stench of trash rising and mingling with a trace of ginger, the lights at the corner . . .

The girl in the birdcage rises with the rest of the city’s street birds. They caw her awake. Squawking seagulls cry. Piping pigeons coo, picking beads of morning dew off their feathers, which shine brown and gray under the wetness. Other creatures scamper to cross the avenue . . .

What people meant by hardest was how cold. What I meant about worst was how alone. Coldest in at least over a hundred, you’d hear over and over. And it was cold, and it was dark, and the winds never stopped from the season we used to call fall clear through to now, what before was called summer.

She is making me a birthday cake and doesn’t yet know that she’ll probably throw it at me. In about fifty minutes’ time, perhaps an hour, our marriage will be over. She smiles fleetingly, more sensing than looking at me . . .

It was getting late and everyone was telling their gun stories. Times they’d had a gun pulled on them, almost been shot, or, for just a couple of people, times they actually had been hit with a bullet . . .

In Babylon they say that certain fish burrow to conserve moisture when the river dries up. Then they come to the surface to feed. They walk on their fins. They move their tails in gestures of greeting and farewell. All this is said. When they are chased, they escape; but they always turn to look . . .