If I hear you once more say the word love, I’ll take the imaginary child, his hair gleaming on my shield, or reflected in your Subaru’s window, and present him on a platinum platter for the Cyclops to devour for the world’s amusement. This is commensurate with the nature of my powers and the natural state of a healthy relationship, not to mention the good of the polity.

The mouth alone must be over a foot wide, and the fan-like tail is kicking up mud some four feet away. My father says no, it is only three feet. He was a chemist and is careful with his measurements. Still, those whiskers, tangling with the sedge along the shallow banks of the Hennepin Canal, I half expect to turn into whips.

tax·on·o·my noun \tak-ˈsä-nə-mē\ : the system or process of classifying the way in which different living things are related by putting them in groups

Ring-tailed Lemurs (Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Primates; Family: Lemuridae; Genus: Lemur; Species: L. catta)

On the way to Lancaster, he stops to buy his daughter a gift.

It’s a residual habit from long-ago business trips, though Meredith is both far away and past such things.

Avner had woken up too late. Only when he walked over to get the coffee going, his electric toothbrush humming along—how Netta used to hate that—and caught a glimpse of the clock on the kitchen counter did he realize he’d miscalculated. How had that happened?

It has a been a miserable summer, the worst, the summer that began with the Boston bombing, the summer three girls were discovered chained to a radiator in a rust belt house of horrors, the summer of the George Zimmerman trial. For weeks his smug, fat face has popped up on every Internet site, like one of those inflatable clowns you can’t flatten.

Z. So inside that seventy-foot wall of water washing over the stone footbridge, somewhere in this accidental wave, inside it, the bride disappears.

And the groom?

The fog might be lighter today. I tell Sonia this, and she smiles. It might, she says, and pours more coffee, that which resembles coffee, as the ocean resembles the ocean—briny expanse, crashing waves. Dirty peach foam, vaguely magenta in the deep end.

I walk now. I walk along the bus route now. Some days I trail a block behind the red stream of the bus’s taillights the whole way, some days I never see the bus at all or any other moving vehicle. Or person. I see animals, occasionally: rats, squirrels.

Lily King's fourth novel, Euphoria, is told from the point of view of Andrew Bankson, an English anthropologist doing fieldwork up the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Isolated, in despair about his work, and suicidal, he crosses paths with the only other anthropologists in the country, the newly famous and controversial Nell Stone and her husband, Fenwick, who are in want of a new tribe.

Maybe they had you read Paradise Lost or Howl.

OK, I’ve got this thing about money, wanting

lots of it -- no, all. So Heaven probably helped

me cope, but it was mainly the shits, flapping