A cow tied with a rope 40 feet long to a post in the middle of a field eats all the grass within reach in 2 days. How long should the rope be so that she will have just grass enough for 3 days?

A monument consists of two cubical blocks of granite, the smaller resting on the larger. The total height of the monument is 8 feet and the volume is 152 cubic feet. Find the exposed surface.

SHE'S STUDYING for a test, and it's like her book bit her or something: she can feel herself within herself backing away. She's reading about parchment, how it's animal skin -- and all this time she thought the mottled stuff at Kinko's was imitation paper, paper made in the merrye days of yore -- before bleach. Sure, she knows about leather bindings, but that makes sense: purses, shoes, the covers of books -- they're of a category, a category for which rich people still demand flesh. But the pages of books (leaves, she underscores in a file card in her brain, leaves?! surely not . . . ) are indelibly paper to her.

Turning skin after skin -- she tries to imagine it, text etch-a-sketched in livestock. This is crucial information, it changes everything, puts books in such a different relationship to her body that she thumps herself on the head a couple of times to get it to compute. (Naturally, she bangs herself with a book.) What were you doing the day the teacher talked about this in class?! her brain is shrieking. Probably trying to decide whether or not to give yourself a permanent.

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SHE'S WATCHING a sci-fi drama, a drama doomed to a single season: the scripts are wooden and the actors unskillful, but she kind of likes the premise, which is that the next big evolutionary step has occurred, and beings -- who look human but are really a genetically advanced brand new species -- undertake the battle of the fittest to wipe out poor homo sapiens sapiens. If it weren't for computers, which can read the enemy's blood, the humans wouldn't have a clue about their lamentable situation. They spend a lot of time huddled around a monitor, isolating segments of slides with a cursor, magnifying, zooming in. The bloodscape's a thing of teeming beauty, no matter how amped the image: the monsters' interior life is as crafty as any virtual reality she's ever known. She imagines herself fleeing the planet with the rest of her supposed species, but she's worried: has she ever seen anybody write a book in space? Has she ever seen anybody on a space station make anything?

SHE AND HER GIRLFRIEND have been to the Geographical Center of North America -- not to be confused with the geographical center of the United States or Canada or Mexico, not to be confused with the Center of Population Density in any of those geopolitical zones. She's confused, though, about why such a concept exists, about who the hell they think they're kidding: take one look at the fractal-like ins and outs of any coastline on a dumb road map and you know they fudged the math.

The motel room is plastiwood-panelled, the carpeting forest green, and once she'd hooked the camcorder up to the TV, her girlfriend clipped the curtains shut with a clothespin, so it's nice and dark. They're lying on one of the beds, atop the lead-gray spread, watching their day go by on the screen. For a while, they'd left the camera running, propped on the window frame of the car, and it's this part of the tape that she finds dazzling. By accident, the lens had lain in such a way that the images are focused: there's no nauseating blur.

The undulations of the cultivated prairie ripple like a banner, a light-catching silky banner, blue and green and white and gold. Sometimes a windmill or a cow tracks across the screen as if it were being slid around a gameboard by an invisible mechanism. There must be an hour of this, and she would watch it all again, but it's late, they're on vacation, and enough, enough! It's cool, her girlfriend tells her; you ought to make it into a little movie, call it RunningFence2.


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