As they strolled on, Cosa became increasingly agitated, her arms making terrific swoops through the air as she brandished the sin list she had compiled on the La Paz plane a few days earlier. After some time had passed, Griot composedly inquired into the nature of the physical evidence against her husband, apparently unconvinced by the fact of the list’s existence alone. The disbelief in his tone threw Cosa off. As her emotions reared in the horror of contradiction, she stepped away from Griot, toppling over a haggardly old woman who crouched above an electric pink water bottle. Her momentum building, Cosa fell head-long with great force toward a junk-bedecked hut, the top of her cranium heading straight for protruding corkscrew.

*     *     *

            Maurice went to meet Cosa at the Albuquerque Sunport. A flight attendant wheeled Cosa off the plane, handed the beautiful brunette off to her husband and wordlessly left the twosome together. Maurice leaned in to kiss Cosa, but stopped as he noticed her striking appearance. Her glasses were off, revealing the delicate slope of her nose and luxuriously long eyelashes. For the first time since they’d met, her brown hair appeared soft and unbroken, as if she’d stopped chewing it. He lovingly stroked her face, her red lips already curled in peaceful ecstasy. His hand ran up her creamy white neck, along her ear, and through her voluminous mahogany locks. As his fingers reached the top of her scalp, they ran against a small circle of brown felt, almost invisibly attached to her head. Maurice sighed wistfully, remembering the university’s call about her accident and early homecoming, and firmly pulled Cosa’s smiling lips to his. He hadn’t noticed the spoon upon which her fingertips sensually slid.

            As the weeks passed, Cosa gradually became more of a person, though never the wild-haired woman he had known. She rarely spoke except for when she wanted him to bring her something, and even then her sentences were clipped like a mongrel dog’s tail. She languished against the satin sheets of their bed for hours every morning before finally going to kitchen, eating whatever finger-foods Maurice had left out, and letting him drive her to work.