M. T. Anderson
around corners and peeking and diving, and there were these mirrors set up to confuse you, so you’d see all these nonexistent beef hallways. We were big laughing and we’d run into each other and growl and back away. There were other tourists in the steak maze, too, and they thought we were cute.
    Then we sat and had some cider doughnuts that we bought at the farm stand. We got some that were plain and some cinnamon. I liked the cinnamon better. Violet said that it was important to start with the plain, so that the cinnamon seemed more like a change. She said she had a theory that everything was better if you delayed it. She had this whole thing about self-control, okay, and the importance of self-control. For example, she said, when she bought something, she wouldn’t let herself order it for a long time. Then she would just go to the purchase site and show it to herself. Then she’d let herself get fed the sense-sim, you know, she’d let herself know how it would feel, or what it would smell like. Then she would go away and wouldn’t look for a week. Then she would go back finally and order it, but only if it was on back order and wouldn’t be shipped immediately. Then finally when it was ready to ship, she’d like be, oh, hey, I don’t want it shipped hour rate, I want it slow, slow rate. So it would take like three days to get to her, and then she’d leave it in the box. Finally, she’d open the box just enough to see like the hem of the skirt or whatever. She would touch it, just knowing it was hers. She’d run her fingers along it kind of delicate. Just along the edge of it, not even really letting herself touch it completely, just gently, with her fingertips, or maybe the back of her hand. She would wait for days until she couldn’t stand it anymore to take it out and try it on.
    At this point, I was completely turned on. I wanted to get more doughnuts, but it was this debate between getting more doughnuts, which were really good doughnuts, but not being able to stand up because I had complete prong.
    So we sat for a while just where we were and I flattened out the doughnut bag with my hand on the tabletop. You could tell how good the doughnuts were because they left a clear ring on the paper.
    Later, we went and climbed up an observation tower over the farm. It was getting to be sunset, so it was meg pretty.
    We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.
    Later, when we were flying back in the dark, lit up by the dashboard, she asked me, “If you could die any way you wanted, how would you like to?”
    I said, “Why you asking?”
    She said, “I’ve just been thinking about it a lot.”
    I thought for a while. Then I said, “I’d like to have this like, this intense pleasure in every one of my senses, all of them so full up that they just burst me open, and the feed like going a mile a second, so that it’s like every channel is just jammed with excitement, and it’s going faster and faster and better and better, until just —
BAM!
That’s it, I guess. I’d like to die from some kind of sense overload.”
    She nodded.
    I said, “I’m going to do that when I get real old and boring.”
    She said, “Yeah. You know, I think death is shallower now. It used to be a hole you fell into and kept

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