He says that male giraffes perch their rumps on a sturdy limb and yodel a mating call to woo female giraffes. This really gets him going. The sporadic spurts of mole juice turn into a mini-stream that flows directly from his cheek into the corner of his partially sealed-shut mouth. When he laughs little droplets of juice drip down the front of his black coat and onto the floor.

Every surface sees twisted glass alembics and racks of foster pipes, with slumping sacks of ketterjine and shallow mounds of wax, lit by coral tongues of Bunsen burners played on brass in cooling lengths, held in blocks of hydrogen, with patching pans of solder and rubbing stays and alabaster (matte and gloss) of every single grade. Here is where eleven cats make pearls with me, working hard both day and night.

She follows him through the dimming. The gravel pike crunches underfoot. His gaunt contours lag. His gait is feeble and weighted with an empty canteen slung from one shoulder. His spine bows. He reaches for the daughter. She examines the bulb of his hand. His knuckles callused and scabbed. She takes his into hers and allows herself to be lead.

None of the stimuli that I provided the black tube with resulted in any reaction. I had to bury the evidence.

I went into the basement and took my shovel from behind the Honda lawnmower, then dug a hole next to the porch. It was dark out. There is only one street lamp on my block, so some houses are always in shadow. Once a car went by and its lights reflected off my raised shovel but the probability was low that the occupants were looking for anything that I was hiding. I finished filling in the hole and rested the shovel against the white lattice under the porch. I did that in case it was windy overnight and I needed to smooth the dirt in the morning.

What would you think if you saw all this?

I’d go into a long and desparate appeal regarding your attending Untoward’s one-year anniversary, but that doesn’t seem like the RIGHT thing to do. I don’t want to “used car salesman” you over to the Beauty Bar tonight. All I can say is, with the readers we have lined up, this will be awesome.

The great adventure now, they tell us, is love. Redemption is also popular. These have the advantage that you can tell a story without all or most of your characters dying at the end. These have the disadvantage, that once you have successfully fallen in love or been redeemed, your life can have no further meaning. You are forced to live the remainder of your life as a nothingness, as a narrative lacuna.

Anyway, one sign of good writing, they say, is the ability to use words like untoward naturally in places where they actually fit. If we have to reach for a word, or cram it in somewhere just to demonstrate our erudition, maybe we should ask ourselves: Am I writing to convey information, create a mood, tell a story, touch a reader, or am I writing (a) to show how clever I am, or (b) to convince somebody to believe something I want them to believe?

You: cut your hair short for summer, found a fetish site, sold your ponytail to VetteStud68, asked me for a standard envelope I knew wouldn’t fit. It: didn’t fit. We: found a brown box, peeled off the labels, put another layer of packing tape on the edges. You: put your hair in a sandwich baggie, told me to kiss it good-bye.

Monty was not a monkey, to start–he was a gorilla, a mountain gorilla to be more exact. (Bradley wasn’t positive about the latter but he brought in a big book of gorillas for the apathetic clerk at the consignment shop to look at and identify. The clerk had pointed at the first entry without even looking at it, and continued to work on a sketch for his latest tattoo. Customer service, Bradley had thought, at its absolute worst!)

Rid! cost eighty-nine cents more than the other leading brands, but what was a little extra money when compared to the dozens of bug bites we’d otherwise suffer? It wasn’t even a question.

No one liked smelling like a factory vat, so Rid! came in surprisingly pleasant smells like Spring Mist! and Autumn Dew! and Ozark Morning! and Nightingale Bliss! Some of us who were men had reservations about scents of any kind that weren’t deodorant or a tasteful cologne. The vague suggestion of perfume worried us, but this was dispelled when our wives or girlfriends would embrace us, bury their heads into our chests, and say Mmm, you smell nice. We liked this.

Life outdoors, even if was just our backyards or parks, was carefree with Rid! We didn’t even worry about West Nile anymore. Not even when we heard maimed birds cry from the sidewalks as flies swarmed around them.