Alone for the first time on New Year’s Day, the tea house woman watches the DVD delivery boy on his bicycle bump away down her cobblestone street until she can no longer see the outline of his shoulders, warm with tenderness for all shoulders and shoulder muscles, her favorite part of the body to watch…

That night, her Portuguese lover shows up with a bouquet of white lilies, wearing a navy blue suit, and she is transported back to her wedding day. Her cheating husband, nearly a stranger by the end, had been such a hopeful bridegroom, boutonniere pinned over his heart. Even then, Sam’s hair was turning silvery. He…

Years ago, during her husband’s funeral, the tea house woman felt freed from her marriage. She didn’t know it, but Sam had ordered doves to be released into the air, and it was a lovely, holy gesture, but when the clapping of their wings erupted all at once around them the tea house woman started…

Sitting alone in Vic’s Tavern, the tea house woman orders a drink, whiskey, one rock, recalling her mother’s valiant but futile fight against the intrusion of every new neighborhood bar and coffee shop that opened in Fenwick proper. It had been her mother’s desire to restore their family tea house to its former glory by…

Wondering why she has not heard back from her young lover (she has called him multiple times over the past several days), she despairs, locks herself inside her parents’ bedroom, removes her dress, and sits at her mother’s vanity, draping loops and loops of necklaces around her neck, comforted by the weight of them against…

She carries him to bed, raises and locks the safety bar, picks up Metamorphoses and reads aloud the stories of the gods, comforted by the transformations of their bodies, the dramas of their fucked-up lives, their children’s fucked-up lives, their celebrations nonetheless of love. Eventually, the worn paperback will fall from her lap to the…

Terrified he will fall sleep and not wake up, she treats her father like a Christmas ornament—fragile, afraid to shatter him. His skin is whiter than the whites of his eyes. She bathes him in her Jacuzzi tub, lifts him onto a towel and into his chair, dries the creases of his buttocks, hips, knees,…

The goddess weeps over her mortal lover’s body, says, In a flower thy blood I will bestow, and where his blood pools spreads a blanket of bright red anemones dotted with white anemones everywhere her tears fall, the red and white petals yawning open, winking closed, blinking open in the gentle breeze that burns her…

They fell asleep in the fetal position, his penis still inside her until one of them shifted in the night. In the morning she took his cock into her mouth and sucked, lightly, lips soft as a bee landing on a plum blossom. He reached with both arms and pulled her toward him, onto him.…

In this city, all citrus fruit grows sweet. Citrus, which smells just like Mother at the sink, washing. Mother, who had died so many years ago, now as vivid as actual, scrubbing oranges at the kitchen sink before breakfast. How many times had she done that? Year after year. Lighting the new fire of the…

After the bal masqué, her young lover (dressed as Eros) requested that she give him orders. Why not? she thought (disguised as Catherine the Great), and pleased him by telling him how to please her, and was this not love? She told him to stay the night, asked him to weave her a new myth.…

What’s on your mind, he wanted to know. I have more to offer than this, she thought, right? Gifts more meaningful than hooker stockings and stilted conversation over Christmas Eve stew? I want to tell you something, so listen, she should have said, but what came out instead was, Let me help you with the…