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Image from cinema history: Ravenhaired Bardot plays St. Bernadette while Orson Welles hangs from theatre cables with Cecil B. ) He thrusted behind you and grunted without grace. I saw you begin to shake gently as though you were rooted and water gushed past your tubers underground. You bit your lip. I understand this now as your orgasm, the first I witnessed. You did not call out but arched like a slow acrobat on a trapeze. He cried like a stabbed thing. He withdrew and the condom slid from his purple cock.

The clock blinks 6:00 into puddles. Alarms sound in hidden rooms, waking those with beds and reasons to rise. Automatic coffee makers turn themselves on in the suburbs while radios receive lists of catastrophes and doorcrashers. Women bend over rigourously in spandex and legwarmers and men light first cigarettes. Refugees cross themselves or prostrate eastwards. Pale night-shift nurses and smeared whores perfumed by unfamiliar yet unsurprising secretion draw back the deadbolts to their shitty apartments and commence the running of baths.

Veronica, do you remember how we once played at guessing the name of the corpse for whom each particular flame danced? I chose saints' names. You chose the names of the strippers you'd seen on the Brass Rail marquee. Dad moves away. He drinks. He stops for a moment to cry rose. He draws back a curtain and kneels in a confessional. He is silent. After a while, he backs out of the stall and enters the priestly side and sits on the pillowed chair and imagines listening to the sins of strangers. Both stalls look the same, with velvet rims.