gifts, others use her for sex or love or both, and through it all her expression never changes. Yet she is wasting -- it is imperceptible for the first or even second-time visitor, but nothing escapes your eyes. Even as her skin is bathed in the golden glow of the coastal sun, her face is ravaged by sleeplessness and something more -- perhaps opium, perhaps a drug of her own making. Within her innermost sleeping quarters, a bird with plumes of green and blue is confined to a cage, utterly still and silent, a living muse-um piece. Outside, her dog prowls, a fierce shaggy brute with drool that scalds. Every visitor is confronted with sharp-clawed paws, a bite that leaves obelisk-shaped wounds, and in very unlucky cases, a throat shredded like scorched parchment. Yet she loves this dog, even as she waddles after it, her voice too hoarse from yelling at it to even order it to stop. She refuses to leash it, impede its freedom of Lin Page 8 movement in any way. Even as the storm rolls in and the rain slashes through the opened win-dows, she sits at the veranda, her crimson robes falling all about her and the smell of desiccated ginger radiating from her. The dog barks and yelps and tears at the walls, slashing paintings hundreds of years old. I am well, she says. She turns to shush the dog, but even her finger to her mouth seems shriveled, inadequate. When you have nothing left, but you know that your life continues, you attain this kind of peace. Far away, in her bedroom, the bird chirps once. Now the dog charges you, and you grab its maw between your two hands. Even as your fingers grow thick with spittle, you consider snapping its neck. It would be easy. Just an inattentive flick of your hand, and it would be done. Or maybe the correct option would be to extinguish the bird in its cage: a well-aimed poke of the finger, and its glassy eye would acknowledge your service as it