Sarah lies in the dark, listening to cars and trucks on the distant highway. She pictures them, lumbering along like Goliath beetles, their metallic bodies glinting in the moonlight.

Scorched wind blew in the car window and whipped through Mel's thistledown hair. Frogfur, her mother called it. Such sparse growth, only an inch long, stained pistachio green from hundreds of stolen midnight swims.

Dear Doctor March, you asked about my dreams. So here's one I liked:

A week before my nineteenth birthday, I married my first husband: let's call him "Dick."

Naked as a snake, Myrttie rises slowly from the pond. Water drips from her henna-red hair, runs along streambeds of wrinkles, gathers in the dimples of buttocks, breast and belly.

That beat up Chevy stepside wasn't no classic. Wasn't no babe magnet, neither, but it'd tell people he was Hank the Handyman. Somebody reliable, who'd show up on time and get 'er done.

I never saw my son. That wasn't the way they did things in those days. But I know he had blue eyes, because his father did and so do I. I know about genetics because in my senior year of high school, I wrote a term paper about Gregor Mendel and his peas. It was the first A-plus I ever got.