Finally she saw him again, at a college reunion. Four gaudy chandeliers in the 
ballroom shivered out splinters of light; the music was southern-fried rock, 
decades old and sounding worse than ever. In his unbearable thirst she’d given 
him the last, the first, the only water from the spring of her body--a theatrical 
gesture only they two could remember. He wore a long-sleeved blue cotton 
shirt, as he and his brother had worn so often years before. Even the greying 
hair shone gold above his lupine eyes, which found her through his thin-
rimmed, expensive, glasses, through the chattering crowd in between them. She 
wanted to say something to him, to bite it into the base of his neck deftly 
causing a bacterial infection, to sling the words at him with her cat’s tongue, 
every syllable covered with a million tiny barbs. They’d snag in the membranes 
lining his nose, his ears, and fester there. She’d ask him if he knew what his 
brother had done. He was her last link to his brother, the transparent mucous 
thread of white when an egg is separated, to the brother who was not there 
enduring the music, not standing restlessly beneath the lights feeling heat crawl 
across his skin like a sickening insect, a tick. She wanted them both to know 
she remembered, she had not forgiven it. Now she stood next to him beside a 
round table draped in white rayon, laden with a garish centerpiece and trays of 
meat, flesh sliced so thin she could see through it. And miniature, delicate 
vegetables were gathered in edible ribbons, in intricate bows and knots, like 
bouquets in a doll-house. The ballroom is inside the doll-house: the roof’s 
been removed and now she’s looking down into it. She doesn’t know anyone in 
there--anyone. And how would he know what his brother had done? How 
could he know his brother? The next morning she’d tried to pretend it hadn’t 
happened, her pretending becoming the strangest crime of all. No, you did Not,
she’d insisted to the brother, receiving him into her body before she never saw 
him again. To scare them away from cigarettes, her high school had shown the 
students a film--a human lung was cut into delicate slices, terrifically thin, on a 
steel machine just like one in a deli. The camera examined a sliver: the lung 
tissue was elaborate, lacey, crystalline in disease, like the polished plane of a 
geode. If she sliced the muscle of her heart, would its grain be as simple, as 
smooth, as these shavings of lox and prosciutto? No, she didn’t care for a 
cocktail. No, not a glass of wine. She wanted silence, ice water. She’d take a 
swallow, lick and lick and lick and lick the thin flesh of her forearm with her 
cat’s tongue, smoothing the cool damp arm across her flushed face, wiping hair 
from her eyes, and she’d talk to no one.