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Gulliver broke his leg with a swish of his tail; then he chewed two fingers off the hand of another man who tried to wire his jaw shut. In the confusion, Gulliver managed to slip out the door of the bathroom, which had been widened for his removal, taking refuge in the living room. When Anemone arrived on the scene, her mother was dancing around the room trying to keep clear of him.
    “Get down and crawl!” Anemone urged, as Gulliver, broken furniture and torn carpet in his wake, was closing in. The scarsfrom her plastic surgery twitched and pulled as Anemone’s mother dropped to the ground screaming.
    “Mama, try singing! He’d never eat you while you’re singing.” So her mother, half fainting, sang “Blue-eyed Doll” with all the strength in her surgically enhanced vocal chords while Gulliver listened, one leg planted squarely in the middle of her back.
    At the time of their move to the condo, Anemone was seventeen years old, Gulliver three meters long. Anemone did some renovating in Gulliver’s new home, breaking down the walls between the rooms and adding a humidifier, with the heat turned up high all the time to simulate the crocodile’s birthplace, the delta of the Irrawaddy River in Burma. Future plans included a couple of dozen ultraviolet lights to be hung from the ceiling. Gulliver’s room she dubbed Uranus—“King of the Heavens”—a distant world where one year equals eighty-four, and where the atmosphere is so heavy that only low-lying lichens and ferns could survive, with only creeping animals like the crocodile to walk among them. The Uranean wind sighed a long, low song as Anemone envisioned the tropical garden she would make in the apartment: a realm of brilliant colors, with the crocodile as lord and master and she herself as jungle goddess; the air choked with the fragrance of flowers and ripe fruit, and here and there coral reefs and pools of seaweed teeming with sea turtles, palm trees, and lite beer.

    “Rain again,” said the driver, catching Anemone’s eye in the rear-view mirror and striking up a conversation. He seemed to be the chatty sort. Anemone stared out the window at the traffic, which was getting heavy.
    “Rain,” he repeated. “The weatherman said yesterday the rainy season’s over, but it’s still so humid you can’t keep thewindows from fogging up. My grandmother always told me there were only two things in life you could trust: the weather forecast on NHK and Sanseido’s English-Japanese Dictionary. That and the signs on the cages at Ueno Zoo… And maybe the umpires in high school baseball. Grandma graduated from college in the twenties when almost nobody where we came from even went to school… Shit! Look at that asshole trying to cut in… She was a smart old girl… Damn glass keeps fogging up… Uh, miss, pardon me for being nosy, but what college do you go to? I’ll bet it’s a music college…”
    Anemone ignored him, and the man went on chuckling to himself and cursing other drivers. She had flagged down the cab in front of the wholesale butcher’s, where her heavy bundle of frozen meat had been carried to the car. It was just bad luck, she discovered after she was settled inside, that the driver was a bit too friendly.
    “Know how I can tell music students? They’re a dead giveaway: powerful shoulders means a pianist; a thick neck means a singer; violinists have got calluses on the chin; and cellists are bowlegged. Pretty good, huh? Guess you could say I’m not your run-of -the-mill cabbie. I’ve always had this gift for noticing things, and my friends all tell me it’s a shame to waste it in a job like this. They say I should’ve been a writer or a ship’s captain or something. Ship’s captain… now there’s a job. You have to be able to size up your crew pretty good or you can end up in trouble… Yep, you’d have to be real sharp for that… Real sharp… Miss?… Miss? You asleep?” People get chattier all the time, Anemone was