Thousand: Seven Hundred Five

at her from the passage to the right. His beard is white but his moustache is still black and it extends as two black stripes down a beard that touches his chest. The man’s hair is dark, mostly, and clips hold it back from his face. The girl approaches him, though the guardian has turned down the lefthand passage. “A tree?” she says, the voices in the fountain continuing to babble as lucidly as before. “The welt of a new ventricle aligning, tusk-like, to the epicanthic fold,” the fountain says, “while Venus’ children feverishly pick secrets from the strings of