Amelia Gray: AM/PM

“They’re all intimidated by you,” Missy said. “They’re intimidated by the fact that a girl as young as you, excuse me, could be so sophisticated and beautiful and great.”

“They’re not sophisticated,” Chastity said.

Having a flea bite made Frances feel fleas everywhere. She dug her hands into her hair, scratching her scalp. She had said a few months ago that she’d never had a flea bite, which was how these things happened.

“Not at that age,” Missy said. “They don’t even know how to fake it until at least thirty.”

“Men begin at thirty,” Chastity said, raising her glass.

“Life starts the day after thirty-five,” Frances said. She felt like there was a flea under her arm, where she couldn’t look without being conspicuous. Instead, she scratched under her arm.

Missy was watching her. “Are you okay? You look itchy.”

“I am itchy,” Frances said. Her heel had worked its way to her mid-calf. She couldn’t say anything about fleas while they were eating. “I’m itching to find a man!”

A couple at another table turned to look. Frances reached under her shirt, scratching her belly.

“That’s no way to find a man,” the woman said.

Frances glared at the woman. “You stay out of it!”

Hazel and Tess were spending an excellent Sunday afternoon trying to decide the best way to die.

“Old age?” Tess suggested.

“Old age is a cop-out,” Hazel said. “It’s a nice way of saying your organs have sunk so low that you can’t summon the strength to reach them. Dying of old age is like being crucified.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Think on it for a while.”

Tess didn’t like it when Hazel told her to think on things. “Exposure,” she said.

“That’s a good one, in theory, but what is one truly exposed to, in those last moments?”

“A blizzard, usually.”

Hazel gave Tess a look that meant Tess was a few steps behind in the conversation again.

Carla switched off the hair dryer. “It’s easy to forget how much around us is flammable,” she said.

Andrew didn’t look up from his dress shirt. “I believe I have a stain,” he said.

“We could all go up at any moment.”

“The human body is ninety-five percent water.”

“That’s just the blood,” she said, pulling her hair up into a rhinestone-studded clip.

“You’re being morbid.”

“I’m telling the truth. Bone is only twenty-two percent. Give that a couple days to dry out and you’ve got yourself a nice little blaze.”

He looked at her. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The landscape men trimmed the trees outside Olivia’s office window. It was necessary, because the branches were providing easy access for squirrels to the roof.

She watched them remove a series of ash branches, working up to a large one near the top. When the workers cut it, it didn’t fall. The remaining branches were thick enough to hold it up and it hung there, suspended, the cut section swinging slowly with the movements of the tree.

The man sitting alone smiles when his phone rings. The couple smiles at one another and the woman covers her mouth. A father walks hunched through the parking lot, a newspaper under his arm. He reaches for the child’s wrist. The girl touches the car’s headlight to hold herself up. Inside, a college student writes in her day planner with a purple pen. A young man takes pictures of himself next to the door. Tess feels that at any moment her heart could stop.

The truck, advertising FISH and MEAT and GOURMET BRANDS, got stuck on the hump between the parking lot and the road in front of the deli next door to our apartment. We went outside because we wanted to count the wheels still touching the ground but the driver waved us away. So we went back inside, where we could only see the back of the truck from the window, and just barely the cars in the street, swerving to avoid it. Somebody said, What would happen if the back end disconnected from the front end, and rolled in through the window and into our home? Killing us all? And causing thousands of dollars of structural damage for our landlord? And somebody else said, I think you have sufficiently answered your own question.

Imagine if you could call up all your exes, and bring them together on a basketball court to play a pickup game. Maybe you could also call all the girls you’ve ever loved, split them into the Girls You Had a Chance With and the Girls You Never Had a Chance With. Have them play shirts and skins. It won’t be for your honor, though you’ll be the only one watching. You will promise pizza and beer to the winners. The girls you never had a chance with will spit and glare, and the girls you still may have a chance with will snivel and look at you when they make jump shots.

The winners will take your wallet and invite the losers out. Everyone will forget to give you directions, and you’ll be left sitting in the gym parking lot.

You’ll go home and watch basketball movies. You’ll build a makeshift court from scrap lumber in your backyard, and leave messages on all of their answering machines, inviting them back. You’ll go out back every night and play H-O-R-S-E, waiting for them to return. You will wear your shirt when you are shirts and you will remove your shirt when you are skins.

It was still dark, but Terrence’s eyes adjusted enough that he could sense the movement of his hand before his face. “Charles,” he said. “I believe we are in a small box.”

“Indeed,” Charles said, from the darkness. Terrence judged him to be about five feet away, but when he reached his arm out, he touched Charles’s knee, which startled them both. The knee was cold and hairy. Charles’s knee made Terrence more nervous than the existence of the small box.

He leaned back and startled again when he touched the soft walls of the box. The thick velvet felt deep enough to sink his fingers into, but he didn’t want to know what was down there and instead let his hand rest on the surface.

Terrence considered the letter he would write to his girlfriend when he was free. He thought fondly of the time they ate cotton candy until she vomited.

Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that nobody can go so far as to say “good morning” in public without being liquored up. If ever we do accidentally function as human beings, we call it instinct , as in, “sorry about the coffee, or your dress, or my last marriage, but I was operating on instinct,” as if it’s a failure to behave the way we’re all designed. Everyone forgets that acting on instinct has gotten many soldiers through many wars and the rest of us through long lives. The realization caused Tess to paint the dead ladybug on her bedside table with gold frost nail polish, which, as she predicted, did make it look prettier.

Social code was created for the thrill of dragging one’s fingertips across the inner thigh of another man’s wife. It has been enforced for centuries so that the room will go quiet when the boss is advised to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. The thrill of acting on instinct should never require an apology. An apology would be an act of belittlement; receiving it, an act of humiliation.

The ladybug is not dead: Good-bye, golden friend.

By then, the cats were used to the sound of construction next door. Carla hoped it would make the move easier for them, though she anticipated the startled cat noises, the wide eyes and that low groan like the sound a machine makes. This didn’t help the prospect of the big move, of course. There were boxes that needed to be opened and checked for contents, and still more boxes that had to be created and filled with the last of it, including perishables, spillables, and the last of the glassware. Packing glassware in secret sounds more stressful than it is. With the newspaper softened by the humid air, it would be easy to wrap and pack her wine glasses without waking Andrew at all.