Oscar had a sister. A swatch of her hair, dropped in an envelope labeled Isola. That’s what’s left of her tiny breasts, glazed with sweat, the eyes covered with drenched muslin. He can’t cut a pepper in half and not think of her body—the feverish knots—finding lumps on her arms and digging them out. The garden grows long without her blurred dress, the little tongue slipped out her mouth like a leaf. The stigma opens on top of the pistil. A long hollow tube goes to the ovaries. There's a little cell, hidden, in his feminine hand.