Various Valentines

I.
Alternate Ending

In the final decade of man’s existence, people take up smoking again, compete to deflower remaining virgins. Meanwhile, a miniscule subculture—recovering addicts, nuns from defunct orders, former self-mutilators, and precocious children—embarks on a monumental project. They cover the inundated globe with water-lilies hearty enough to outlast their cultivators.
II.
Feeling Inside the Box

20,000 of you are inside the box with a Pizza Hut, two first-run theaters and a mental hospital with one prescribing physician. Outside the box is sand, the sound of mortar. On Christmas, your wives telephone to confess their infidelities. Still, you could take yourselves on a fine date: dinner, a movie, Prozac.

III.
Caught on Tape

At the push of a button, the lithe algorithm sidles up to the processor and makes it do its dance. Data swim through equations, fertilizing variables. There’s a voice behind all of this, the word holy repeated several times, though no one’s bothered to translate it. Men gather round the screen to watch their monster being born as math.

IV.
All Realism is Science Fiction

On the day that they gave her someone else’s face, she used the stranger’s lips to kiss the one she had secretly loved since childhood. She had reckoned on the scars, of course, and the pain, the patchwork way she would look, but she had not anticipated the aftertaste of courage left in the dead woman’s mouth.

V.
No Love Lost

Entropy may be the macro reality, but there are consolations: energy, for example, is like Saul converted. Why not the output of the heart? Here, then, is love as she transacts: broken flower pot, slaughtered pet, reams of regrettable prose, and other, better varieties of love.