There’s this girl and she’s obsessed with the Stone Age man. The Stone Age man is someone she read about in one of those books for children: pictures of the Stone Age man in tiger pelts, in dotted loincloth, in repose. The Stone Age man ate food off the tips of spears. The Stone Age man always took a wife. Like his wife, the Stone Age man was skilled in painting and combat, expressions of blood on cave walls. The Stone Age man never worked. The Stone Age man never went to school. The Stone Age man was the guy who invented candy, which came from raspberries and the cheeks of an extinct relative of trout: a great long fish called Salvelinus Mykiss with coruscating, karshapanic scales; this candy flooded his brain with genius chemicals of the sort that begat subsequent inventions of fire and silk and intensely pleasurable modes of intercourse, involving—among other zones, erogenous and not—the ear. The Stone Age man had perfect posture. The Stone Age man would live till thirty and then drop dead. The Stone Age man had no autoimmune diseases. This girl’s favorite thing about the Stone Age man is how well he knew the stars. The Stone Age man had a name for every star in the sky—there used to be so many more, the girl knows—and he could harness their light for the operation of Stone Age microwaves. The Stone Age man was around till about 1,000,000 B.C.E. The Stone Age man didn’t know he lived in the Stone Age, which is a thought that makes the girl feel sad. After the Stone Age man came Jesus. One day after Jesus the Stone Age man would become the modern man. Neither the Stone Age man nor the girl know anything about the modern man. If she had to guess, the Stone Age man wouldn’t like the modern man, the girl thinks, probably—the modern man wears thin clothes made from plants; the modern man doesn’t have a wife, doesn’t know the stars, is diseased, can’t fight—the modern man knows he lives in the modern age: his microwave is modern and so are his shirts and his relationships with the women he won’t marry; the modern man might live till a hundred. The modern man might even fancy himself a kind of Stone Age man, eating his steaks a bit rare. To him, this girl thinks, closing her book, the Stone Age man means nothing.