invisible devices which whisper into their atavistic minds that their mistress loves them, that she thinks of them always, and longs to hold them to her breast.

“To touch a person…to sleep with a person…is to become a pioneer,” she whispered then, “a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many

relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.

Her skin was frost-dry, and he thought he could hear seabirds inside her, flapping at the freezing joints of her shoulders.

But those churches were all nameless to him—he could not pluck the saints who owned them from his forgetful heart,

“My mother makes them every day,” she whispered. “She writes nonsense-fortunes, whatever she is thinking about when she’s baking: The fog is too thick today! Jiangxi Province had proper mist. I am allergic to milk, that sort of thing. People think she’s crazy, but they buy the cookies by the dozen.”

into the city of St. Francis, who after all watched over wild and wayward animals.

a mark there, terribly stark, like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, determined to escape the borders of their

for it was a grid, a crooked, broken grid, angling over her skin, intersections and alleys and monuments labeled in the same miniature script that covered their hallway. He could not read the names, but he was sure they would be in Latin, Lucia’s clear and lucid favored tongue, and the only appropriate dialect for mapmaking, as well Ludovico knew.