Outline

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and death and disordered eating.

The last assignment that Faye gives her class is a story featuring animals. Many of them have not completed it since Christos, the politically minded young man, invited them dancing the previous night. The students describe the evening’s events, as well as their attempts to write the story, as Christos laughs at their observations. 

Christos himself describes how he wanted to bring an animal into his current preoccupation: a debate between two orthodox bishops. As he attempted to write a story bringing together these disparate strands, his mother kept interrupting him. She wanted him to clean his room because important relatives were arriving soon. This was a branch of their family who had emigrated to the United States and frequently boasted of their successful lifestyle via mail and pictures. One of the photos they’d sent was of Christos’s handsome, muscular cousin Nicky with a boa constrictor wrapped around him. Christos felt emasculated by the image. Since he wanted to make up for the disappointment, he stopped writing and cleaned his room. In the end, Nicky and the boa proved inspiring, as Christos finished his story of the bishops on the bus, with the snake featuring as a symbol of hypocrisy and lies.