She begins her day with a cigarette. Like a crazy old seer, she claims she can predict the outcome of her days by the richness of the nicotine stain on the filter. So many bad days. It’s expensive being poor. A man in the diner booth across from her stands up, his large, dense gut corralled by an old leather belt whose holes are worn soft and stretched like silent screams. He walks by her, chest wobbling, propelling him forward – a green Jell-O mold wrapped in a blue flannel shirt. The sound of his wheezing makes her look up from her book, she thinks he sounds like a goose caught in a vacuum cleaner. Today she feels like this man’s shoes – cheap and worn with the weight of the world inside her.

To escape, she builds her life from books, living in the quiet crush of words. Words can feed you. Good words take a long time to chew, and feed that empty, aching, gnawing in our darker spaces. So every night, alone, she devours books – tongue all gum ball black, the leg of an A scraping her teeth, I’s caught in her molars. She longs for books with elemental half-lives. She wants them to decay, word by word, until new meanings can be drawn from them. So they can be forever reread and rewritten. She plays games deciding which elements, which half-lives. H³ – 12.26 years, C¹⁴ – 5730 years, Na²² – 2.605 years, Si³² – 100 years. And after countless years, just before the bible becomes a sheaf of empty pages, what will be the final word that endures?