“If you like him, I suppose you can see him on alternate Thursdays.” She responded to this with an Italian phrase they’d heard near Mulberry Street; it translated to “misery pig,” an image so evocative that they’d added it at once to the lexicon of borrowed human idioms that now peppered their conversations. The Jinni’s particular favorite was don’t bite my head off, overheard on a summer night when they’d walked beneath a couple arguing on a fire escape. The phrase itself, and the plaintive anger with which the man had yelled it—Sweet Jaysus, Bernice, don’t bite my head off!—had struck the
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