Bettie—who licks her lips way too often, turning her mouth scaly and pink-red like cooked shrimp—goes outside a lot. Her favorite thing to do is stroke the moss on rocks and between cragged fissures in pavement, where it climbs up and splays along openings like a patchy beard. She likes to shave the moss from the rock with a razor blade and sow it into clothing. Her wardrobe is filled with green faux furs and shrubby undergarments and leafy woolen caps that leave crumbs of dirt in her hair, which headlice use to plant rice-grain gardens on her scalp. Bettie wishes often she was a rock, but it never comes true. Sometimes she prays, though God’s never done much for her. Even if her wish crossed paths with a shooting star, or God threw her this one, singular bone, Bettie simply could not pull off being a rock: she talks too much and can’t grow moss for shit and licks her lips raw and tender. Rocks do not.