Now she seemed absolutely perfect, and the only puzzle was why she was with him.

She floated into the room, looking like Cinderella before midnight.

He didn't know how to use a tap!

She tried to calm it down but it just continued to flap and quack.

He suffered from boyish idiocy.

Sometimes she grew so angry that she thundered.

She urged him to leave her--to go to London and amuse himself: when he left her she smiled, when he returned she smiled.

It wasn't going to be easy but she knew it would be worth it.

He gathered his strength and will, and won the fight.

She missed the way he made her laugh at the silliest things.

Perhaps naively, he hoped fervently that his young son would be spared the rigors and horrors of war.

But she strove to reason herself and laugh herself out of such imaginings.

He sank slowly through the dark water, arms out, feet pointed: like a Christ, or a dervish, casting a benediction on the sea.

She had her demons, and she wrestled with them most of her life.

If his arms hadn't been stuck to the floor, he would have covered his eyes.

She knew what she wanted, and in a world dominated by men, she knew how to get it.

He mopped with enormous, exaggerated care, and in extreme slow motion.

She found herself sitting on the tram-car, mounting up the hill going out of the town, to the place where he had his lodging.

He wished he knew how to hurt her, too.

She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil.

He called upon his inventor's creativity to find a solution to the dust that aggravated his asthma as he swept up at night.

She dreaded the thought of them walking in and catching her banging her cymbals in the shrine.

But he just knew the Dinobots would get free and ruin everything.

She drank all of the water and the larvae.

He sniffed the basement air like he always did.

She did not like women, which would have been easier to deal with had she not been one of them.

He winced at the prostrate corpse.

And down she shrank so small.

He strode like a colossus.

There was no denying her authoritative tone.

He returned the next Sunday with $2.50 in hand and persuaded the pilot to take him aloft.

Like the trees that filtered the polluted air, she filtered the blackness of their woes so that light could exist.

He wished that he had his real gun, which was stashed in some bushes not too far away.

She pushed the boat away from the dock, grabbed the cord on the motor and pulled hard.

And when he finished the last stroke, the ocean rolled off the paper.

She experienced transient feelings of unreality and depersonalization, with a sense of disorientation in space.

An expensive suit hung uneasily on his frame, as if reluctant to get too close; his shirt was a disturbing mauve.

She noted the cost of chocolate syrup and white chocolate syrup at $54.00/gallon and $58.00/gallon.

He fell through the unguarded opening, striking a three-inch angle iron scaffold support and falling to his death in the Gulf of Mexico.

And her hands were restored to her, goodlier than before.

He licked the mossy floor but it tasted sharp and tangy, like the urine of a disease-ridden rodent and he retched and coughed and spluttered.

Things were revolving obscurely around her, like great dangerous machines in a darkened factory, and she was walking blindly among them...

Decades later he destroyed his own leg with a shotgun, an act which apparently liberated him from his tormenting obsession.

She felt as if she knew nothing and could do nothing correctly, and she felt quite alone.

So, ultimately he lost all the things he had so voraciously clung to.

She fell asleep just at the good part.

When he washed the ceiling the stucco melted onto the floor.

Even as she debated the answer to herself, she knew it was a moot point.

It reminded him of times when he had felt more alive and in control than God Himself could have felt.

The same voice that she grew to love; She too, in that same hour, died.

A surfer, he grew curious about hurricanes primarily because of the effect they had on waves.

By the age of six, she had learned that life wasn't anything like the fairy tales.

The dark night caressed him as he skittered like a black widow over girdered steel and mortared brick.

Adieu, she cried, and waved her lily hand.

When he recalled his adversity, he beat the fish head with a wooden hammer.

She buried the feelings deep within the inner recesses of her heart, and they had remained there.

After stumbling upon an obscure historical atrocity, he brought it to light as a novel.

She drew a broken heart torn right down the middle in a red jagged line.

He lied and lied and lied.

On moral grounds she decided not to kill it.

He said several times over coffee, over lunch, over afternoon tea that he felt totally let down and betrayed.

As swift as a gazelle, she sprinted through the weaving rows of corn to the teepees beyond.

If he reached to shake a hand, hordes became so frenzied he was whisked away.

She wandered in her own wilderness.

Unable to contain his curiosity, he wrenched open the boxes in the driveway.

She flicked on the television only to find infomercials invading the networks.

He was abducted in his vestments by a Calvinist gang and frogmarched to the Market Cross, where he was tied up and pelted with ten thousand eggs for four hours.

She had not yet plumbed the depths of his villainy.

He snatched a glass of champagne from a waiter and drank it in one gulp, then, as the man moved on, reached for another drink.

She blinked at the nightstand she found on the sidewalk right outside her home one morning.

The blood glowed under his skin as he remembered another word.

So, she lifted weights; took voice lessons; got a flat-top haircut; and learned to apply fake stubble to her face.

He hated error, and therefore, to confute it, he shouldered his way into the very sanctuary of truth.

Then she filtered the whale oil from each lamp into a clean container and disassembled and cleaned each lamp, before putting it back together.

Throughout the 1960s, he wandered the campus of his alma mater in red high-top sneakers, keeping to himself; students teased him and called him the Phantom.

Despite the strange beauty of her movements, he could not understand why she was dancing, naked.

He might slow enough to drop a missile with a warhead of tailored algae, if a target world could be found.

She went between men and women, seemingly unable to decide which gender she preferred, and was often unfaithful to whomever she was with.

When old, he wilted and handed out flowers, preached "pure Christianity" and warned against involving yourself too much in anything but a relationship to God.

She longed to be a flame.

He flipped through the book's pages until he found a pair of limbs that matched the woman's.

Then she saw a small peach with a soft neon glow.

One morning, he wrote down all of the passages in the Bible that he felt were the backbone behind Seventh Day Adventist philosophy.

Later, she found his name in a history of the blues.

At times, he loved her and at times he thought that she was his father's lover.

As soon as she was out of the magpie's sight, she crept along the short corridor which led back to the garden.

He needled the air with his baton as though poking a rotisserie ham with a thermometer.

For the next three years, she traveled all over the world with her meditation and yoga teacher, studying Indian philosophy, Sanskrit, yoga, Indian music and cooking.

He forced himself to think about Denver.

She lived in a cream-colored world.

He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings.

She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.

Despite his youth and delicate health, he retired to a desert; he practiced severe mortification, tempted continually by the demons expending all their efforts to make him abandon this life of total renouncement.

Hopelessly behind schedule, she frittered away much of the remaining time on an unrelated project.

Not thinking too much about things, he returned home only to develop a bad case of curiosity later in the day.

But when she ordered a chicken Caesar salad in a restaurant one day, it never occurred to her that the small amount of cheese in the dressing would be a problem.

He grasped the strategic importance of Hungary.

She took the lamb and drove to Boston, where she stayed with a friend.

He knew they could be petty and egotistical but he also knew they were possessed by a writing spirit and were unable to do any other kind of gainful work.

She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future.