Lindsey said, “I don’t smoke.”

The man straightened up. He said, “Not that kind of light. I mean a light. Do you have a light?”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then because he was not bad-looking, she said, “Sorry.”

“Stupid bitch,” he said. “Never mind.” The watercolor illustration in his book showed a boy and a girl standing in front of a dragon the size of a Volkswagen bus. The man had a pen. He’d drawn word bubbles coming out of the children’s mouths, and now he was writing in words. The children were saying—

The man snapped the book shut; it was a library book.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask why you’re defacing that book?”

“I don’t know, can you? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but why ask me?” the man said. Turning his back to her, he hunched over the book again.

Which was really too much. She opened her shoulder bag and took out her travel sewing kit. She palmed the needle and then jabbed the man in his left buttock. Very fast. Her hand was back in her lap and she was signaling the bartender for another drink when the man howled and sat up. Now everyone was looking at him. He slid off his stool and hurried away, glancing back at her once in outrage.

There was a drop of blood on the needle. She wiped it on a bar napkin.

At a table behind her three women were talking about a new pocket universe. A new diet. A coworker’s new baby: a girl, born with no shadow. This was bad, although, thank God, not as bad as it could have been, a woman—someone called her Caroline—was saying.

A long, lubricated conversation followed about over-the-counter shadows— prosthetics, available in most drugstores, not expensive and reasonably durable. Everyone was in agreement that it was almost impossible to distinguish a prosthetic shadow from a real one.

Caroline and her friends began to talk of babies born with two shadows. Children with two shadows did not grow up happy. They didn’t get on well with other children. You could cut a pair of shadows apart with a pair of crooked scissors, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. By the end of the day the second shadow always grew back, twice as long. If you didn’t bother to cut back the second shadow, then eventually you had twins, one of whom was only slightly realer than the other.

Lindsey had grown up in a stucco house in a scab-raw development in Dade County. Opposite the house had been a bruised and trampled nothing. A wilderness that grew, was razed, then grew back again. Banyan trees dripping with spiky epiphytes; tunnels of coral reef barely covered by blackish, sandy dirt that Lindsey—and her twin, Alan, not quite real enough, yet, to play with other children—lowered herself into, to emerge skinned, bloody, triumphant. Developers’ bulldozers made football field–size depressions that filled with water when it rained and produced thousands and thousands of fingernail-size tan toads. Lindsey kept them in jars. She caught blue crabs, Cuban lizards, yellow-pink tobacco grasshoppers the size of toy trucks. They spat when you caged them in your hand. Geckos with their papery clockwork insides, tick-tock barks; anoles whose throats pulsed out like bloody fans; king snakes coral snakes red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black friendly Jack corn snakes. When Lindsey was ten, a lightning strike ignited a fire under the coral reef. For a week smoke ghosted up. They kept the sprinklers on but the grass cooked brown. Alan caught five snakes, lost three of them in the house while he was watching Saturday-morning cartoons.

Lindsey had had a happy childhood. The women in the bar didn’t know what they were talking about.

It was almost a shame when the man who had theories about being raised by wolves came over and threw his drink in the face of the woman named Caroline. There was a commotion. Lindsey and the man who had theories about being raised by wolves went for a walk on the beach. He was charming, but she felt his theories were only that: charming. When she said this, he became less charming. Nevertheless, she invited him home.

“Nice place,” he said. “I like all the whatsits.”

“Most of it belongs to my brother,” Lindsey said.

“Your brother. Does he live with you?”

“God, no,” Lindsey said. “He’s . . . wherever he is.”

“I had a sister. Died when I was two,” the man said. “Wolves make really shitty parents.”

“Ha,” she said, experimentally.

“Ha,” he said. And then, “Look at that,” as he was undressing her. Their four shadows fell across the bed, sticky and wilted as if from lovemaking that hadn’t even begun. At the sight of their languorously intertwined shadows, the wolf-man became charming again. “Look at these sweet little tits,” he said over and over again as though she might not ever have noticed how sweet and little her tits were. He exclaimed at the sight of every part of her; afterward, she slept poorly, apprehensive that he might steal away, taking along one of the body parts or pieces that he seemed to admire so much.

In the morning, she woke and found herself stuck beneath the body of the wolf-man as if she had been trapped beneath a collapsed and derelict building. When she began to wriggle her way out from under him, he woke and complained of a fucking terrible hangover. He called her “Joanie” several times, asked to borrow a pair of scissors, and spent a long time in her bathroom with the door locked while she read the paper. “Smuggling ring apprehended by___. Government overthrown in___. Family of twelve last seen in vicinity of___. Start of hurricane season___.” The wolf-man came out of the bathroom, dressed hurriedly, and left.

She found a spongy black heap, the amputated shadow of his dead twin and three soaked, pungent towels, on the bathroom floor; there were stubby black bits of beard in the sink. The blades of her nail scissors were tarry and blunted.

She threw away the reeking towels. She mopped up the shadow, folding it into a large Ziploc bag, carried the bag into the kitchen, and put the shadow down the disposal. She ran the water for a long time.

Then she went outside and sat on her patio and watched the iguanas eat the flowers off her hibiscus. It was 6:00 a.m. and already quite warm.

The Keys were overrun with iguanas. They ate her hibiscus; every once in a while she caught one of the smaller ones with the pool net and stuck it in her freezer for a few days. This was supposedly a humane way of dealing with iguanas. You could even eat them, although she did not. She was a vegetarian.

She put out food for the bigger iguanas. They liked ripe fruit. She liked to watch them eat. She knew that she was not being consistent or fair in her dealings, but there it was.