For Valentine's Day, my wife buys me a $10,000 doughnut sealed in an aluminum box. Glazed with a melting curtain of gold leaf and crusted with marbled spheres of Brazilian blueberries, the doughnut is the most beautiful pastry I've ever seen. It smells like the heat of the morninglight on my face after waking from a blissful dream. It tastes like the buttery axeblade of the moon plucked from the parchment of the midnight sky. But the doughnut does not last long. In one-hundred seconds it disappears from my life forever. Now the remaining crumbs gleam on my plate like the eyes of suspicious crows. A swill of tasteless saliva floods my tacky mouth. My gut churns with the stinging grief of the black and foamy ocean. So I lead my wife to our bedroom in the attic, where we lay on our backs on the shag carpet and gaze out the glassless skylight in the ceiling.