Our pastor, a sickly-skinny man, believed that he could gaze into a person’s eyes and know instantly if that person was one of The Elect. He said there would be a certain light, a ring around the pupil.

Time gets wasted when people aren’t hard enough on the others around them. She taught us that, somehow.

By no means do I need to have the most exciting breasts at Rintintin, but given certain prior behavior on my part, expectations, insofar as me presenting nominally normal nipples, for example, feel particularly raised in terms of what I bring, body-wise, to tonight’s tapas.

Here is a child looking at me, snot smeared under his nose, eyes slack and dumbstruck, silent, staring, starting to resemble me.