Yesterday, while walking home from the Castro, I had a premonition: I am going to run into someone I know.

In the intersection of 16th street and Market I saw V, and V saw me, and I thought Ah, the fulfillment of the prophecy.

V looked happy to see me—her face woke up and she tipped onto the balls of her feet—oh, hello—as if I were her personal discovery. It has been thirty-six days since we broke up; we were together for a year.

She was still tall. She looks like a gangly, broad-shouldered teenager, or a muscular Patti Smith on the Horses album, her choppy black hair wagging in her angular face. I had forgotten how, when her hazel eyes, black eyebrows and smooth Irish/Canadian skin all fall together, she’s lovely. She can be ugly too, the blunt jaw and sharpness and fear take over. V is like one of those psychology illusion pictures: princess/witch, princess/witch.

How are you? I asked.

Oh, I’m fine, she said. Hey, my sister got a goat. She laughed and fanned her long fingers at each side of her head. It has little goat ears and a little goat mouth. I got to feed it a bottle, just like in the movies, you know, Heidi or something. She laughed again—it made me happy to see V laughing.

Two months ago she would have come back to my apartment and we’d have fucked in our jeans on the couch, these prehistoric sounds coming out of my throat—who knew those sounds were in me? V made me marvel at my own body; I thought anyone who could elicit such primal music would save me from something, the everyday I guess. Once, we talked about adopting kittens and buying a house together, and then my imperceptible unhappiness evolved into gross unhappiness. A week before I started this project, I adopted Spot and Fido on my own.

V lit a cigarette but did not give me her strong glare—only this far away, disappointed look across Market Street as smoke drifted between the gap in her front teeth. I was sorry to see her smoking again, but I said nothing, because it would only make her mad.

In Harvest Market I bought a ginger beer, then I walked to Petpourri and bought Spot and Fido a crocheted ball stuffed with catnip. At home I tied the ball to a piece of white string (the one that was hanging from the track light on the ceiling) and dragged the ball into the kitchen. The kittens chased it. I dragged the ball into the bedroom. I dragged the ball from one end of my home to the other until the string let go and the ball flew off and got lost in all my junk under the bed. Then I propped pillows on my couch, read student papers, and stared out the dirty windows.

The wild, renegade parakeets are squawking in the palm trees on Dolores, and on 15th Street a young man breaks into ballsy gospel at the top of his lungs. He flings his arms into the air.

V is still in love with me, which makes me feel sad, but also happy. And for a moment, while I lie on the couch surrounded by student papers, I feel a bloating. An irresponsible, iridescent shine.

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Nona Caspers’ book of stories Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusettes Press) won the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize. A Book of One Hundred Days will be available from Spuyten Duyvil in Fall 2007. Her work has been honored with a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award and a Barbara Deming Grant and Award and has appeared in Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, among others.

The above is an excerpt of A Book of One Hundred Days.

Other works on Sidebrow: Day Three, Day Nine, Day Ten, Day Eleven, Day Eighteen & Day Twenty-three