He chuckled self-deprecatingly. "I guess you could look at it that way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The story's important to me, is all."

"What are you going to do with it once you're done? There aren't a whole lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know."

"Oh, I know it! I'd write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn't for publication -- yet. It's going into a drawer to be published after I die."

"*What*?"

"Like Emily d.i.c.kinson. Wrote thousands of poems, stuck 'em in a drawer, dropped dead. Someone else published 'em and she made it into the canon. I'm going to do the same."

"That's nuts -- are you dying?"

"Nope. But I don't want to put this off until I am. Could get hit by a bus, you know."

"You're a G.o.dd.a.m.ned psycho. Krishna was right."

"What does Krishna have against me?"

"I think we both know what that's about," she said.

"No, really, what did I ever do to him?"

Now they were on Queen Street, walking east in the early evening crowd, surrounded by summertime hipsters and wafting, appetizing smells from the bistros and Jamaican roti shops. She stopped abruptly and grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard shake.

"You're full of s.h.i.t, Ad-man. I know it and you know it."

"I really don't know what you're talking about, honestly!"

"Fine, let's do this." She clamped her hand on his forearm and dragged him down a side street and turned down an alley. She stepped into a doorway and started unb.u.t.toning her Alice-blue babydoll dress. Alan looked away, embarra.s.sed, glad of the dark hiding his blush.

Once the dress was unb.u.t.toned to her waist, she reached around behind her and unhooked her white underwire bra, which sagged forward under the weight of her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She turned around, treating him to a glimpse of the full curve of her breast under her arm, and shrugged the dress down around her waist.

She had two stubby, leathery wings growing out of the middle of her back, just above the shoulder blades. They sat flush against her back, and as Alan watched, they unfolded and flexed, flapped a few times, and settled back into their position, nested among the soft roll of flesh that descended from her neck.

Involuntarily, he peered forward, examining the wings, which were covered in fine downy brown hairs, and their bases, roped with muscle and surrounded by a mess of ugly scars.

"You...*sewed*...these on?" Alan said, aghast.

She turned around, her eyes bright with tears. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swung free of her unhooked bra. "No, you f.u.c.king idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a year. They just grow back. If I don't cut them, they grow down to my ankles."

Mimi was curiously and incomprehensibly affectionate after she had b.u.t.toned up her dress and resumed walking toward the strip of clubs along Richmond Street. She put her hand on his forearm and murmured funny commentary about the outlandishly attired club kids in their plastic cowboy hats, Sailor Moon outfits, and plastic tuxedoes. She plucked a cigarette from his lips, dragged on it, and put it back into his mouth, still damp with her saliva, an act that sent a shiver down Alan's neck and made the hair on the backs of his hands stand up.

She seemed to think that the wings were self-explanatory and needed no further discussion, and Alan was content to let them stay in his mind's eye, bat-shaped, powerful, restless, surrounded by their gridwork of angry scars.

Once they got to the club, Shasta Disaster, a renovated brick bank with robotic halogen spots that swept the sidewalk out front with a throbbing p.e.n.i.s logomark, she let go of his arm and her body stiffened. She said something in the doorman's ear, and he let her pa.s.s. When Alan tried to follow her, the bouncer stopped him with a meaty hand on his chest.

"Can I help you sir," he said flatly. He was basically a block of fat and muscle with a head on top, arms as thick as Alan's thighs barely contained in a silver b.u.t.ton-down short-sleeve shirt that bound at his armpits.

"Do I pay the cover to you?" Alan asked, reaching for his wallet.

"No, you don't get to pay a cover. You're not coming in."

"But I'm with her," Alan said, gesturing in the direction Mimi had gone. "I'm Krishna's and her neighbor."

"She didn't mention it," the bouncer said. He was smirking now.

"Look," Alan said. "I haven't been to a club in twenty years. Do you guys still take bribes?"

The bouncer rolled his eyes. "Some might. I don't. Why don't you head home, sir."

"That's it, huh?" Alan said. "Nothing I can say or do?"

"Don't be a smart guy," the bouncer said.

"Good night, then," Alan said, and turned on his heel. He walked back up to Queen Street, which was ablaze with TV lights from the open studio out front of the CHUM-City building. Hordes of teenagers in tiny, outrageous outfits milled back and forth from the coffee shops to the studio window, where some band he'd never heard of was performing, generally ambling southward to the clubs. Alan bought himself a coffee with a sixteen-syllable latinate trade name ("Moch-a-latt-a-meraican-a-spress-a-chino," he liked to call them) at the Second Cup and hailed a taxi.

He felt only the shortest moment of anger at Mimi, but it quickly cooled and then warmed again, replaced by bemus.e.m.e.nt. Decrypting the mystical deeds of young people had been his hobby and avocation since he hired his first cranky-but-bright sixteen-year-old. Mimi had played him, he knew that, deliberately set him up to be humiliated. But she'd also wanted a moment alone with him, an opportunity to confront him with her wings -- wings that were taking on an air of the erotic now in his imagination, much to his chagrin. He imagined that they were soft and pliable as lips but with spongy cartilage beneath that gave way like livid nipple flesh. The hair must be silky, soft, and slippery as a pubic thatch oiled with sweat and juices. Dear oh dear, he was really getting himself worked into a lather, imagining the wings drooping to the ground, unfolding powerfully in his living room, encircling him, enveloping him as his lips enveloped the tendons on her neck, as her v.a.g.i.n.a enveloped him... Whew!

The taxi drove right past his place and that gave Alan a much-needed distraction, directing the cabbie through the maze of Kensington Market's one-way streets back around to his front door. He tipped the cabbie a couple of bucks over his customary ten percent and b.u.mmed a cigarette off him, realizing that Mimi had asked him for a b.u.t.t but never returned the pack.

He puffed and shook his head and stared up the street at the distant lights of College Street, then turned back to his porch.

"h.e.l.lo, Albert," two voices said in unison, speaking from the shadows on his porch.

"Jesus," he said, and hit the remote on his keyring that switched on the porch light. It was his brother Edward, the eldest of the nesting dolls, the bark of their trinity, coa.r.s.e and tough and hollow. He was even fatter than he'd been as a little boy, fat enough that his arms and legs appeared vestigial and unjointed. He struggled, panting, to his tiny feet -- feet like undersized exclamation points beneath the tapered Oh of his body. His face, though doughy, had not gone to undefined softness. Rather, every feature had acquired its own rolls of fat, rolls that warred with one another to define his appearance -- nose and cheekbones and brow and lips all grotesque and inflated and blubbery.

"Eugene," Alan said. "It's been a very long time."

Edward c.o.c.ked his head. "It has, indeed, big brother. I've got bad news."

"What?"

Edward leaned to the left, the top half of his body tipping over completely, splitting at his narrow leather belt, so that his trunk, neck, and head hung upside down beside his short, cylindrical legs and tiny feet.

Inside of him was Frederick, the perennial middle child. Frederick planted his palms on the dry, smooth edges of his older brother's waist and levered himself up, stepping out of Ed's legs with the unconscious ease of a lifetime's practice. "It's good to see you, Andy," he said. He was pale and wore his habitual owlish expression of surprise at seeing the world without looking through his older brother's eyes.

"It's nice to see you, too, Frederick," Alan said. He'd always gotten along with Frederick, always liked his ability to play peacemaker and to lend a listening ear.

Frederick helped Edward upright, methodically circ.u.mnavigating his huge belly, retucking his grimy white shirt. Then he hitched up his sweatshirt over the hairy pale expanse of his own belly and tipped to one side.

Alan had been expecting to see Gregory, the core, but instead, there was nothing inside Frederick. The Gregory-shaped void was empty. Frederick righted himself and hitched up his belt.

"We think he's dead," Edward said, his rubbery features distorted into a Greek tragedy mask. "We think that Doug killed him." He pinwheeled his round arms and then clapped his hands to his face, sobbing. Frederick put a hand on his arm. He, too, was crying.

Once upon a time, Alan's mother gave birth to three sons in three months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary -- before these three came along, she'd already had four others. But the interval, well, that was unusual.