Calamity

A new thrill’s a calamity. A violent accident. You’ll have an ache now, where there wasn’t one before.

or it’s a newly introduced foreign species (I’ve forgotten the term) some iridescent fish that looks so delicate, a brilliant purple flower on a creeping vine. (It’s all right. It’ll never take root here. It’s too cold.) Before you know it, the vine swarms over the telephone poles and the native fish—dull-colored bottom feeders—have all but disappeared.

The wonder is how a new desire appears in your life fully formed, as if it had been there all along. A room in your house you’ve never been. The door was papered over, the doorknob hidden in the pattern, but the room was always there, with white walls and a straight-backed wooden chair and an elegant slender lady, very tall, sitting for years in a brocade dress, hands in her lap, face painted for the Easter service, waiting for the bell to ring, so that she can come out through the wall, and tip her head and show you her enormous prick.