When the last sound had faded away, Mathilde freed herself from her binds, which apparently had only been mental. Then it happened. Henna turned around. As if in slow motion, her ear came into view, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, her nostril, and then the rest. She smiled, proud of her new song. Mathilde sat up slowly as Henna approached her, and eventually their hands touched. They had waited centuries for this. Henna’s hand really existed; soft and covered in sweat glands, it glided out from Mathilde’s palm onto her face, with the thumb ending up in her mouth. And Mathilde wanted nothing more than to stick her own thumb into Henna. While they kissed, Mathilde pushed her thumb slowly into Henna’s butt. And then she once again became conscious of how we exist around our assholes. She had never previously been so conscious of it as on the day that they were reunited. And later that afternoon, she carried her butt cheeks—which, big and round, as if in honor of her asshole, took pride of place in the middle of her body, celebrating and accentuating the portal to her interior—through the streets of this new world. With every step, the cheeks of her butt pointed in and out as they started swinging. Their movements as she walked said a lot and seemed at the same time to hide something, the most intimate thing, the most private thing, the asshole. The rosette-like sphincter where so much depends on whether the passage through it is in or out, the never-ending, never-exhausted wellspring of pleasure.