I tugged at her sleeve: doorbell? She hugged the arm: magpie. Intervals went by spotlessly, but somehow foetid, too. She stitched, I read the Apocrypha, abruptly slammed shut the covers, suspicious of fumes rippling through the room. I was poking around under cushions, bracing myself for the worst, dead fruit, something under the rug, a gelatinous potato. Would you stop? she pleaded. Vm cooking. Oh, I said, that explains everything. I stared at her for a very long time, I felt horns growing, meagre horns denting my baldspot. That book was a fake, a neon sneer across the ages, a prolonged rasp corrupting the squeamish, among whom I loomed as a negligible connoisseur. I felt discouraged now as I watched her leathery fingers unfold her munificent banner: Endurance, it read, as though the Bridegroom had endowed her, and she were the Bride? I tugged at her sleeve: telephone? She rocked in her trance: coyotes.