they’re gone now,’ said Kismet. Once the language of the geese had faded, the two lovers who were the best of friends walked toward the streetlamps, twining their fingers together, sometimes stopping to sit on metal benches beside small new trees on the quiet main street. When they talked about signing papers to get legally married, they started laughing and soon lost all dignity and choked, snorted, burped, wheezed, even farted, adding to helpless hilarity, which made them ever more hysterical. In the year that followed they did not get married. They just kept making jokes about it,
