A young man stands in the curtains of his bedroom window. Through binoculars he watches the funeral home across the street, where a crowd is arriving for a service. Sad young girls with bare legs emerge from limousines and file across the veranda in a somber promenade. Their sadness invades him, tears fill up the eyepieces of the binoculars and disturb the lenses. Diffractions of giant legs, bare and smooth-skinned, voluptuous, rise to the young man’s eyes. Compassion and monstrous excitement struggle in him. One of the mourners stumbles on the steps, showing her thighs. The young man is overwhelmed, he loses his balance and topples backwards onto the bed, dragging the curtains with him.
The binoculars clatter to the floor. They metamorphose into a pair of gilt, high-heeled sandals, with morgue numbers scratched in the rhinestones.