She borrowed the shawl you see in that photograph, from a woman she met on the county chain gang. It was all a big misunderstanding with weapons at the root of it and cherries and the mispronunciation of certain verbs that are no longer in fashion. Her brow was more defined then, a line straight as any object you wish to compare it to, but not as pronounced as the sunlight and shadows made it appear. I think there’s a name for this effect, but when you use it the other people in the tavern or the shopping mall where you happen to be all turn around and look at you askance, if they can hear you at all over the violin music and the shouting of good wishes (and threats, though not simultaneously) from one end of the place to the other. It is, finally, something as innocuous as the sneezing, though, that gives us away and there inevitably follows forty five minutes of trying to explain ourselves as if we believe there are tape recorders running and flowers blooming in the nearby window boxes, blooming in the entirely adequate light cast by the moon. Our energy (if you could call it that) came from the nutrients in the clay and that in the food we managed to scrounge up after the clay, persimmons and shrimp, mostly, thrown out with the cabbage that had gone brown. We knew better than to complain. The issue wasn’t really whether or not our needs had been met but if we were going to admit to having such needs in the first place. To announce to all and sundry that we were, in effect, human, much the same way they were. The flesh on the back of her knee began to ache so severely that you might have been tempted to diagnose it as an actual ailment of the sort that lands one in the hospital for an extended stay, but any such prognostication was bound to smack of too much knowledge and not enough wisdom of the ancient variety , too many days packed away in the library, for instance, studying up to be a shaman. By the same token, her powers of recuperation were, if not astonishing, at least noteworthy inasmuch as she took very detailed notes on it and tried to pass them off as the opinion of specialists called in from Toronto to have a look. Maybe we were all supposed to turn our heads around then as far as they could go and endeavor to catch a glimpse, because she was pointing as well as moving her lips. But I for one had had enough of the histrionics and the out-and-out deception that had this habit of looking like actual affection at first, a genuine interest in who you were and what you were feeling but turned out in the end, on closer inspection, to be merely a kind of gazing into the mirror, a way of seeing her own profile better than she was able to see it in photographs or in the drawn-out descriptions left behind by her innumerable suitors.