I’m telling you, Sergei is just a nice guy who’s interested in our culture and government.

I don’t know Dolores, he seems a little too interested.

Gary, stop it. You’ve been reading too much Tom Clancy.

She fled the embers of her home only to come back a week later, to vote for a chance to raise her children in a democracy. She hoped a real government would rebuild their land in a way that would not burn so easily.

All the mimes he employed to regulate traffic in Bogotá play leap frog across the country for his campaign. On their backs are the words of phrases he wrote himself to challenge Colombia, and any other voter in any other democracy. His favorite is “If we dream it, then we achieve it.”

Guys, get in here. They’re going to put a cap on salt now. They’ve already ruled out fat and sugar. Figure out a way to make this still taste good. Do it fast. Do it cheap. Use pesticides if you have to, I don’t care.

Before he died, her son studied the apocrypha. After his funeral she found a manuscript in the piles of his papers in his old room in their house in Medora Crossing, where the Mississippi River goes to the Gulf of Mexico. She read the manuscript in her mourning of him. It was about a prophet named Zephaniah who wrote:

“Again I turned back and walked, and I saw a great sea. But I thought that it was a sea of water. I discovered that it was entirely a sea of flame like a slime which casteth forth much flame and whose waves burn sulfur and bitumen. They began to approach me.”

She brought it to her pastor when the oil company announced it was going to light the water on fire, and she asked, “What should we do?”

The pastor said, “Pray.”

He had never been scared of heights until Hu and Rao jumped. He worried that faced with an opportunity, he might be tempted to do the same.