It was warmer in the cabin now and he only wore thin wool trousers over his red underclothes. He sat at the table and read the Bible. The thin pages rustled between his fingers and he wondered at the incarnation. God, a baby. Mary, young and beautiful.

Her nose in her scarf, the young girl does not budge, she is transforming. It is actually no longer truly her waiting for the crested wave about to emerge from the tear gas cloud. A wave that will carry her far from this provincial hotel, from this mock décor that hides the backstage and wings of a ruined world from all the dirty brats’ view. In their long agony, in their oddly slow fall, the panicked puppets performing this farce will now have to worry about one more dirty dog: a young woman transformed by the final spasms of their doomed aristocracy.

I never considered myself a conqueror of women, how could I? At forty-five, I was a terrible likeness to Cezanne’s rendering of Henri Gasquet, and I can consider myself now perhaps the farthest thing from Don Juan as has ever existed on terra firma, where we all occupy our own little plot of physical space in the rolling carnival. I had one partner in life, Heather, and we got along as couples will (missionary only, secundum artem), until the middle of the second decade when the marriage evolved to a point of sexless nightly routine: “How is your book? Should I set the alarm clock for six or six-thirty? How does your stomach feel? Goodnight dear.”

It was the bluebottles he’d remember for the rest of his life. A dozen or more descending on the body, the sound of their feast would stick in his throat.