by Lawrence Osborne

CASSIDY SARAH O'BRIAN was past thirty-eight and already divorced when she decided to write her thesis on the language of the Outer Citak. They were a remote people of the Maukele forests closely related to the Inner Citak and, more remotely, with the Korowai. She had studied them for some years, aware that they represented to the linguist a niche of underrepresented possibilities. They were Neolithic horticulturalists and no one knew whether they had a past imperfect tense in their language. They might be useful when it came time to post her mark on posterity.