Labors erased by a fretful, wandering hand. We were a movable feast. I am on the edge of the canyon looking out over the gorge. It yawns before me as if it could never be any closer than I am now. There is a blue sky looking down at me, and the river snaking through the flat belly of the canyon. Where are the desert flowers? Is it too hot and dry even for the seekers of the dead heat?

This I wrote in my brown notebook. It was etched in a weird script, something other than what I usually write in. Anya commented on it, said it was "felicitous" that my own script is so forlornly ravaged that I have trained myself to read virtually anything that can be called handwriting. "That's why you should be a teacher."

I smiled and muttered something under my breath.

"Excuse me?" She fixed on me the gaze, a storied and studious look. What can I say to a question posed with such mischief?

I cleared my throat. "I said, 'I know, I'm working on it.'" What I had actually said under my breath is of no consequence to this tale and unfit for print in any decent publication.

"It's always a comedy of manners with you." She rolled her eyes a little and went back to her work. She returned the paintbrush to her mouth, like a bit, using her eyes to incise the fragment of pottery she held. Perched in her left hand, balanced with the right was some thousand-year-old piece of antiquity, the better part of an ewer gangrened with the crud of time and lack of care.

I turned to look at one of the books on her shelf: Gray's Anatomy. "Why do you have Gray's Anatomy?" I hefted the volume. It was solid, and when I flipped through the first introductory pages, I got a whiff of that old book smell, the glue and dust mixed with paper in a slow rot.

"One never knows the reference volumes one might need." She was back into the pot, looking at one spot for seconds at a time, trying to determine, sitting cross-legged now hunched over a piece of brown parchment paper with caked pieces of dirt strewn over it, whether the spot she was looking at was a piece of the original work or another piece of detritus to be hewn away.

Flipping throught the musculature of the adult male and adult female, I hurried past the red strings of muscle and blue lightning arcs of neurons with their bulging eyes and approximations of the human form rendered in what I have always thought of as the least attractive and most engaging light. "This is for doctors, though." Aah, yes. Here we are: sex organs.

She had a tiny chisel with a fine edge on it and was digging the long end under an imperceptible cracked layer in the ewer's coat of dried muck. Her slender fingers gripped the handle and end of the chisel, while the crescent of one reversed thumb edged into the opposite side of the chisel, the vessel itself cradled in between the heels of her boots. "If I were to find medical implements or something...maybe a speculum, say..." Little beads of sweat began to formulate on her forehead under the loose strands of blonde hair.

"I'll say." My eyes widened at the labia majora and minora in all their illustrated glory. "You'd want to know the ulnar nerve from the anus, right?"

"Exactly." She looked up at me and narrowed her eyes. "Though I think you might need more help than I do in that department."

"If I don't own the equipment, I should not be expected to have the manual memorized."

"It wasn't manually that you had a problem, as I recall." She went back to her work, and I resumed my study of the epididymus.

"I didn't hear you complaining."

"You didn't hear me snoring, either."

"Harsh."

"I'm trying to work." She shifted her weight from one buttock to the other and back again, squirming and sighing in exasperation, "and you're making me all hot and bothered. Why don't you go make yourself useful and get me some vinegar?"

There are advantages to being a kept man. One is that fetching is considered being useful, whereas with a dog it is considered playful. Another is that sloth is at times tolerated to the point where simply leaving the room for a few minutes brightens someone's day. "I'm not sure if we have any. Is it for cleaning the ewer?"

"Sure is."

"Okay, not malt vinegar, then." I put the Gray's back on the shelf, silently resolving to find and put a name to the part of me that died when I agreed to live with Anya. "I may have to run to the store to get the distilled, industrial stuff."

"Fine, sweetie."

And we laughed at our circumscription when our chains looked like rose petals, but our abyss was just as bottomless and just as meaningless as the one you held in you. For a time it was only the worst in us that fated us to worn-out husks of our former selves, and then the best began to turn, until all we had had blown away into the wind.

Snippet about Snow

Today is a good day to get a primeval word out of the dictionary and bash people over the head with it. Maybe something like, I don't know, "connubial" or perhaps "perspicuous." Any way to keep the heads rolling, really. Because what is life except empty words and the way you affect others?

This was what I wrote in my green notebook on the fourth day of the year. There were cherry blossom trees with arthritic branch systems, frozen under. I saw a formalism of frost that I hadn't ever seen before, or had never noticed before: total immersion under ice of one cherry tree. The whole tree had been soaked with melting snow and then dried and frozen and then melted again, and frozen again, so that each branch, all the way out to each terminal twig, was completely enveloped in a transparent layer of ice about a quarter inch thick. If I had had a mind to I could have snapped a twig off like an icicle, and the whole tree might have shuddered with the amputation. The whole tree might have glistened and become still for the part of it that it had lost.

Instead I imagined a whole world covered in a thin veneer of ice, every surface slick with ever-perspiring glass. Walking would be an entirely different animal. Maybe even a different form of life, or not a life-form at all. Minor, precisely calibrated movement, highly tensile and attuned to the distortion and degradation of the third-degree lever, would be at a premium. Or very, very sharp claws.

I wanted everything there in the snow, in the ice, wrapped in a cellophane and delivered to my doorstep. And there it was, I had only to run out into it and hazard my knees and ankles. Blue jeans are always so much less predictably awful when it comes to freezing wetness than they ought to be. Everyone who has worn blue jeans in the snow knows exactly what they are getting when they wet the jeans at all: a future of red-chapped legs, denim that is starch-stiff with cold and impossible to peel off with extremities [read: fingers] frozen dumb as a coffee can full of pens, and a natural melting and drying process that takes hours and leaves your jeans warped and fitting tight in the ass and blown out in the cuffs. And yet, there you go again, there I went, out into the snow with blue jeans on, thinking less of my clothes than my sheer bejanglement at the marvel of a snow-covered day.

You can really make a lot more money trading in souls and futures than you can ever dream of making in the lottery. The lotter pays more, but come on, everyone has a soul.