His heart, as it were.

I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out some backstory.

Alma stood on the rim of the foun­tain and looked at the White Hawk. She kept her eyes still and the let the hawk’s flit in and out of con­tact. The bars of the cage were painted with a green wash, and thick like frost­ing. There were two White Hawks. They perched tail to tail, fac­ing oppo­site direc­tions, so their hunched bod­ies seemed to be the wings of a big­ger, head­less bird. In the lit­tle pond beneath them, a soft-shelled tor­toise pressed gen­tly against the tile.

Alma stood, giv­ing proper atten­tion, until the owner came back with chicken, pita, melon and lamb. He dumped half in the water, half in the cage, then held the plate out at his side. A small deer licked it clean.

“It will smell like per­fume,” he said.

She waited.

“If you kill it, its blood is like perfume.”

Plau­si­ble. The air con­di­tioned lunch, elec­tric­ity, wifi–she was drunk on lux­u­ries. That morn­ing, in his suite, she learned a few things: scale in the bath­room, Harry Pot­ter on the book shelf, empty fridge, cereal under the sink. He smiled at her and blushed pur­ple. His sweet-looking, old body made every­thing harm­less, even the white flash of his eyes. It would be so easy not to leave. There, in the open court­yard, he took her jaw in his hand and lifted her face.

Her jaw fit neatly in the v of his thumb and fore­fin­ger. She drew back. He gripped. Her body moved three steps back, but her chin stayed put. There is an ani­mal that looks like this in profile–a giraffe? Some­thing that extends its neck to eat and uses its bot­tom teeth to snap leaves from their twigs. She felt ridicu­lous and pan­icked. She laughed and he let go.