I got out of the tub. I put on a dress and went on a walk. I dripped, creating a little trail of dark grey on the sidewalk that disappeared quickly in the sun. I saw a man. I saw another man. I saw a third man who was more attractive than the first two. The hope that this would be the general trend was crushed three blocks later by the fourth man. The fifth man I saw only from a distance before he turned a corner. I waited at a stoplight next to the sixth man who was not disheveled nor, strictly speaking, deformed, but he was nonetheless extremely ugly. I imagined asking this man to have sex with me. At this, he would weep in disbelief and gratitude, and in his emotionally overwhelmed state, he would fail to jump out of the way of a Ford EcoSport driven by a sleep-deprived teenager. He would die instantly, at the highest point of his life. After I saw the eighth man, I was tired, but I pushed myself to keep going. On my walks I saw women too, of course, but I never paid attention to them, unless they were with a man. When I saw a woman with a man less attractive than her, I paid attention to both of them equally, but only a little. When I saw the reverse, which was rare, I paid close attention to the woman, to determine whether she was incorrect about her own attractiveness, or if I was. The ninth man was walking a dog. I couldn't tell you what kind of dog. I have friends who pay attention to dogs but no friends who pay attention to men. My friends do not say it, but it is clear that if I cannot regulate my attention away from men soon, I will have no friends. By the tenth man, I regretted, as always, the decision to push myself, and turned around. On my way home, I saw an old man, whom I felt I could beat up if necessary. But when we passed each other at close range on the narrow sidewalk, I could see that he had large shoulders and excellent control over his walking stick, and I was forced to reevaluate. In the end I decided that on certain days — for example, if I had the stomach flu or if my rhomboid was inflamed again — he could beat me up. But the exertion would hospitalize him, and though I would recover, he would not. Because I was lost in these thoughts, I perceived very little about the four men I passed on the way home. One was my neighbor, who I normally avoided because he was too attractive. On other days, when I saw him getting the mail or coming home with groceries, I hid in my car until he was gone, but I walked past him without difficulty, without my usual seizing with fear and rage and the urge to capitulate — to what? In my apartment, I got out of the dress and back into the tub, which was tepid and clammy. I put a little piece of soap on my belly and raised it up and down with my abdominal muscles like a low and threatened island. I returned to the sixth man: when the car did swerve into the little pedestrian island we were standing in, it would hit me instead. This was much sadder, I thought, for me and for him.

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