Amateur People- Excerpt

The old woman looked at his cock. A fragile irony, she thought, even fails as a memento, it does. How could he have been my source of breath, my reason to breathe? This pathetic shadow just couldn't have stamped a midnight cave on my forehead. Fifty years. Sixty. She blinked slowly and said, "You see sheer pools of clear thinking, and choose to believe they're tear tools, wet weapons. You see snow and choose to believe it's aged eyesight. You've unlearned your life, even your infancy, if you had one. Of a sorts. You're now only a fool's seer, an idiot's ass, a fool's rear. That child's dimples make your mouth wet, I make you cruel. You want me to make you a man, for all your hatred. Fear rules, indeed it does. I gave you a possible talisman, a salvation, and you called it a paltry pebble. I can give you what you want, my knowing mouth on your past-tense penis, and you'll call it inept. Only because of your own failure, and Time's. You fool, it's true, fear rules."