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Now I’m really curious Her eyes consider me in silence – and more silence, andthat she’s seeing right into ht of her as a Tootsie Pop center, and then – silence, silence, silence – finally, cautiously, she says…‘Okay’

‘Okay?’ I hold it up, the partial ice ball with this little tube sticking out of it

‘Okay,’ she repeats, and her eyes are very still and clear, very dark and watchful This is soers, and freeing the tube the rest of the way from the ice deadens theer prosthetics, and if you’ve ever tried to open a plastic tube and unroll a very ser prosthetics (and really, who hasn’t?), you know it’s not easy And the whole tiets thicker and deeper, like the snow

At last, I e, and read it

Carpe puella

Seize Seize the so Damn I don’t knohat puella means I knohat I hope it means, but it’s not like I speak Latin Nocteme with the intensity of athis up

‘I don’t…I don’t speak Latin?’ I hear myself ask it like a question, and as soon as the words are out, as if by ic, the tension leaves Zuzana’s face

‘Oh Me, either I had to Google that I was afraid it ht be too obscure Here’ She reaches for the scroll and I hand it over, and then she gets a pen out of her bag and hunches over the note, screening it fro more on it Then she rolls it back up and solemnly hands it over

Now it reads:

Carpe puella Zuzana

I s, and it’s cartoonishly audible ‘That hat I hoped it meant,’ I say ‘But if puella meant, like, sandwich, or bicycle, it could have been pretty e enough for irl’s request – or, rather, command – to seize her, and then she asks, calmly, ‘Are there even Latin words for sandwich and bicycle? I mean, did the Romans even have sandwiches and bicycles?’

‘Well, sandwiches There have always been sandwiches The saht sandwiches, too’ What aht now and reach for her? ‘I don’t know about bicycles, though’

‘I don’t think they had bicycles,’ Zuzana says ‘Just unicycles’

‘Unicycles’ I want to reach for her, but it seeic to things like this, a pull of the ht ‘I did not know that Did their togas get caught in the spokes?’

‘All the time There’s even a mosaic of it in Pompeii’

‘It happened to h She was on the back of soht in the spokes, and it was this fli just tore away from the waistband, so there she was, in just her underwear and waistband, on this chic, busy street in Milan while like a dozen bystanders tried to free her skirt froot hit in the head by a pigeon Saeon…pooped on her head?’

‘No No, it collided with her head Actually knocked her off her feet and drew blood She had to get shots, because of the risk of infection’

‘Sounds like Italy was trying to get rid of her’