This is how it happened.

Time is circular, so after the serpent convinced Adam and Even to bite the forbidden apple, they were given the knowledge of good and evil, made more like God, and expelled from paradise.  Not being God, they did not understand why, and so they tilled the soil with their hands, and then with makeshift hoes, and then with plows.  They domesticated horses, and built with mud and clay, and gradually learned to stack rocks on top of one another and seal them together, to create the first wall, and then the first city.

Fully clothed, Richard Yoost lay flat as a plank across the covers on the king-size bed.  It was ninety degrees out and only a slight cross breeze came through the bedroom windows.  The plank position was his first response test, and he learned early on it left an impression that he usually sided with at the end of his inspection.  There was one time two years ago that he was fooled by a fluffed up feather bed.  Otherwise, at this point in his career even on top of the bedding, he was generally dead-on, immediately.  The rest was just measurements and paperwork.

I was alone in the forest.  I was alone on the hill.  The sky above me was midnight blue, and its darkness shone like a sheet of glass in the moonlight.  But there was no moon.  There were even no stars, though there should have been:  the nearest town was dozens of miles away.

I stared up at the empty sky.  Midnight blue, the color of a ceramic tile from ancient Persia.  I walked through the brush looking up, catching glimpses of the perfect night through the tree tops.

I heard a flute.

“How could you stand there naked in front of a bunch of strangers, stark naked?”

Phil didn’t get it, and that saddened Karen a bit. He usually got her perfectly.

“Well, for a shy person, it was the perfect job. I didn’t have to talk to anybody, or make eye contact with anyone. It’s like what I do now.”

“Writing? How so?”

“I am a shy exhibitionist.”

Once, he had graded papers.  People make jokes about a red pen, but it had been standard, back in those days, and the students hadn’t argued.  The red, like the robe of an inquisitor, had meant authority.  He was a polymath, teaching history and mathematics both … a noted expert in the history of mathematics … and he’d been good enough at his work to enjoy it.  But it had been waiting, and it had never come.  Not once, in 30 years, had he felt the electric shock that comes with a student standing up and rebelling for the sake of truth.  They had rebelled, a few of them, the brave ones, the

The keeper of the lighthouse took his indentured apprentice down to the beach for the first time yesterday.  Down the narrow path between the crags that looked like teeth from a tiger and through the jagged points resembled nothing so much as tusks.  The keeper showed his apprentice where they were, but did not bother telling him the signs that would help him remember … he would not have to come down here alone for many years.  Until then, it was better if he didn’t know how.  But he needed to know:  to understand the serious nature of the work his parents had sold him to.

Some people pace when they’re nervous.  Others can’t stop talking.  I, given the opportunity, tweeze.  My eyebrows, that is.  I don’t know if anyone else does it; it’s the one habit I have which makes me wonder if I’m compulsive.  I tweeze my eyebrows every morning no matter what kind of mood I’m in; but when I’m nervous I tweeze them again and again and again.

Patty has Vaseline in her hair and waterproof blue mascara smeared across her eyelids. Hank can see the hibiscus bobby pin in her bun from up in the stands, and now that he sees her in the pool, her arms above her head as she waits for the music to begin, he is nervous. She’s a small brown dot in the center of the pool, which ripples in the evening light. The other girls wander around on the asphalt, their thin frames draped in towels, waiting and watching Patty wait.

When I was ten I lived in Odessa and dreamed of sailing to Africa, Australia or Argentina. I loved all far away places that started with A.  My name started with A, too–Alla–but I didn’t like my name. I kept altering it.  Angelina.  Angela.  Ariel.

I fire my gun. People around me turn swiftly, some duck and take cover. No time to explain. Plastered on the building straight ahead is a movie poster. Your typical will-they-won’t-they edge-of-your-seat romantic comedy. A bullet hole in the male character’s washboard abs. I curse.

In the corner of my eye I see the man dashing across the street. My gun hand outstretched I run after him. Cars honk, people swear, but all I’m thinking of is the bright red shirt I mustn’t let out of sight.