An investigation into the symbolic systems that surround Love, the calcified expectations and traditions and dialectics that were established long before we all arrive here.

May the dictionary grow ever fatter, she wishes, for she has learned that her grandmother loved Scrabble and knew exotic words like qat and xu. Her grandmother will need more of these words as she draws tiles for a never-ending game in eternity. Eternity, it should be noted, is not Heaven. Heaven does not exist, just as God does not exist, for if God is real, the girl’s mother explains, then He is a wicked and cruel God for infecting swimming pools with polio in the 1950s.

Proposals must show requested funds will make a significant impact on the community, on lives, on those in need, on the hard-to-serve, disadvantaged, homeless, at-risk, underserved, undereducated, unemployed, underemployed. Involved. Impactful. Efficient. Effective.

It was just a tickle, you know, just a scratch, the kind of thing that’s annoying to the person sitting next to you in a movie theater. It was just. Just the remnants of a cold. Just allergies. Just a symptom of going outside with wet hair. She is just fine, her mother, her father, her doctor-uncle say. Better than just fine. She is smart and pretty and going places, says her mother, her father, her teachers.

The northern states, their hot dust, are lonely enough without all this.