For dessert there was pumpkin pie. Bumblefuck Pie. An entire one that they split, Lancelot shoving more sweet in to clog up his sadness, the composer matching him bite for bite as if in thrall to a ferocious sense of justice. Lancelot took an intentionally enormous bite to watch the composer mirror him. The man looked like a snake with a rat in its gob. When Lancelot swallowed, he said, “I like you, Walt Whitman.”

And the composer, who had heard this at least, spat, “Oh, you think you’re so funny,” and stood and left the dishes and the crumby floor to Lancelot to clean.

“You contain multitudes,” Lancelot said to his beetled back.