And sometimes it becomes all about appearance, because we have nothing else.  She said to me, "You're so tiny."  But what does it matter?  Life is what you make of it and in the end she's the one who's a marathon-running ballerina, so who cares if she's twenty pounds heavier than I am?  What did I ever do to earn being skinny, or to enhance it?

I didn't say that right, but what I meant was that sometimes I get credit for things for which, depending on your belief system, either God or nobody at all can rightfully claim credit.  I didn't roll up my sleeves and shed pounds.  I was born with a healthy metabolism and a delicate frame.  Twenty-odd years later, I look like this.  That's really all there is to it.  Luck and the passage of time.

I don't want to write a haiku today.  I want to write a paragraph, one that might function in a novel or short story.  I don't know these characters; whoever they are they will come to me in the next 6 seconds or so.

--

Donald couldn't fathom what Clare meant by leaving the room before he was done explaining about the accident, but it didn't seem to him a particularly promising development.  After all, hadn't she been the one to insist that he take the back roads and avoid the highway?  Wasn't she then at least partly responsible for his dented bumper and his broken taillight?  Perhaps it was guilt, he thought, that made her turn her head and tread with great focus down the hall as if she were navigating a minefield.  But had she even heard what he was saying?  He continued to speak, hesitating only slightly and for just a moment, as if she had merely stepped out to wash her hands in the bathroom down the hall and was keeping an ear trained on the sound of his voice.  But when, moments later, he heard the familiar creak of the third stair above the landing, he knew that she had gone.  He stood in silent disbelief, mouth agape, eyes wide.  He wouldn't see her again until morning.