Allie had an outsized bump on the bridge of her nose that made her think she might be turning into a rhinoceros. Deacon Tucker, her unofficial mentor in all things, told her that this could not be, that God wouldn’t create her a girl and then decide He’d made a mistake. For the first time, Allie saw that Deacon Tucker was wrong, and on two counts: she wasn’t a girl, but a woman, and she herself imagined that God would be big enough to admit His own mistakes. Her fears were not assuaged.

Even as a little girl, ever since she had first seen rhinos on a National Geographic television special, she had felt a special bond with them. She had vivid dreams of roaming the African savannah, carefully balancing her tottering weight on round grey feet with three toenails, sometimes daintily testing the yellow grass to see whether it would support her and at other times letting her wild self go into a lumbering rhinoceros gallop that tore up miles of earth.

All of those she took into confidence on the subject seemed to agree with Deacon Tucker, more or less, but Allie had read Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, so she knew as they didn’t just how possible it was for a human to become a rhinoceros. Every morning she awoke from a dream and checked the bridge of her nose — the lump on it, more specifically — and was forced by the common incredulity to leave it at that.