"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission, she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a ridiculous human being, she did. Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.