“Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.”

“I figured Alan wasn’t really Alan anymore, that maybe the meds or the disease had made him someone else, someone more timid, someone I actually felt close to. I kept hoping that this would be it, that this would be as bad as it would ever get.”

“-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy?-No, definitely not, sir.-Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you?-Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir.-Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think.-I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir.-One more month? Why?-Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime.-And why not?-I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside.-Why?-Because everything happy right now is going to die.-But Billy...-I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty.-But Billy, of course, anything might...-I would not like to be reminded.-OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy.”

“Apples are kissing other apples. Gray cats are kissing other gray cats. Trees are kissing trees. You and I are not kissing. We work in an office together. We are both married to other people. It is okay because we only have ideas, you and I, about whether we should kiss or not. These ideas are both good and bad, probably. At work, we do not say these words aloud but make elaborate diagrams for one another. You write these words: Kissing you would be like this, and draw a picture of two butterflies being struck by lightning. I stare at it and wonder if you may be right. I do my own drawing and write, Kissing you would be like this, and sketch a picture of a man made of ice kissing a woman who is actually a stove. We have made hundreds of these drawings. We do not actually do any work.”

“It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.”

“We’re adults,” he says quickly. “I’m only here to work. I won’t bother you or anything.”“Fine,” she says. “Great.”“Great,” he repeats.“We’re too good of work friends anyways.”“We are?”“I mean, we’re probably too much alike,” she says.“Yeah, it would be too weird. If things didn’t work out.”“These things never work out,” she says.“Exactly,” he says.“Exactly.”“Right,” he adds. “Exactly.”“And who needs all the weirdness?”

“In our town there is a secret spot where you can still see the stars at night, believe it or not. It is the only spot like that left, unclouded by the dwindling skyscrapers rising nearby. It is a good place to go to walk and talk in whispers. Following the little hill that rises from the park to a small clearing which overlooks the statue of the armless general on his bronze steed, most of us later remember this spot as the first place we knew we might be in love.”