His cheeks were chapped. He’d been facing an autumn wind for a long time.

A lady, wearing a snakeskin sari, opened the door.

"I was about to go dancing," she said.

Blatt took off his hat and said, "Is this the house where the dead man Blatt lives?"

"Yes," she said.

"Could I come in?"

"Why not?" His eyes unbuttoned her dress. "Since no one asks me out I might as well ask you in."

He stepped down a long hall.

"And I suppose Blatt," he said, "was lip-reading fish till the end?"

"He never met a metaphor he didn’t want to molest," she said.

"He was much at home on the water?"

"He was indeed a man for the water," she said.

"And the fire, too," he said.

As a child Blatt had stuck a wooden match upright into a matchbox. He’d started it on fire in his bath water. He had pulled the wings off of horse flies and he had made them his sailors, "Cadaveric sights," he’d said, watching the little bodies drown, "piling up on the other side."

"Why did you ever marry me?" she asked.

"It’s lonely out there, incubating in the gloom. You made me feel like a child staring at the moon and then I became a beautiful young boy who saw the moon floating on still water, and with my brain on fire, I leapt into the water and drowned."

"Cry me a river," she said.

Blatt hung his hat on a hook in the kitchen and said, "Blatt always hung his hat on that hook and then he’d sleep the escargot of sleep."

"Could you spell sleep?"

He sat down at the kitchen table and said, "A child asked me once, how do you spell cow, and I said, why do you give me something so big, why not ask me something small, like mosquito?"

Blatt laughed till he wept so he closed his eyes and when he opened his eyes he saw that she had placed a handgun on the table.

He picked it up.

"Do you know any appropriate hymns?" she asked.

"I know how to dance," he said.

"Seven hundred and seventy-six hymns in the hymnal and you don’t know one?"

"Dancing in the dark," she sang gaily.

"Till the tune ends, we’re dancing in the dark . . ."

"You have the voice of Blatt," she said.

"Time to play," he said. He put the snub-nose of the gun in his mouth.

There was a clock on the wall, a ceramic cat’s round face, and a black tail for a pendulum.

He could hear the tock tock tock of the clock.

"On our bridal night," she said, "Blatt came out of the bathroom all naked. Yes. And so I got undressed and as I got undressed he put on my clothes. I took off my garter belt and he put it on, I took off my shoes and he put them on . . ."

"And what is flesh," he whispered, ". . . but a ligature to secure the mind’s trouser worm."

He could hear carnival music on the wind, the music of a calliope, painted horses bobbing somewhere in Argentina, and the turning of the calliope reminded him of one of their wedding gifts, a calliope of tin angels hanging onto a brass ring with a candle in their centre and when the candle was lit the heat from the flame drove the angels to turn in a circle, starting up a music box that played "Joy to the World."

"Remember our tin angels?" he asked.

"Dum-dum-dee-dum," she sang, making the sounds of staggering children in an orphanage.

"Don’t dee-DUM me," he said.

"Joy to the World," she said, standing over the stove, its utensils of skilled depravity, and she turned up the fire under a pot.

Blatt opened his mouth, tasting the aroma of stale reheated prose.