When it was the time of day for me to dream about deserts, my brother came home to me. Little flecks of radiance clung to his shoulders and eyebrows like dandruff, and he told me he was in love. I asked him if he thought a desert was a romantic place, and he shrugged. “I like fast food restaurants,” he said.

He told me about the girl he loved. She was slender, smart, and pretty. Well, I guess we all hope for the best.

But just once I kind of hoped he would like somebody different. I remembered what he had once told me, about his Fat Romance revolution in art. He had said it like that. ‘Fat’ and ‘Romance’ were capitalized and ‘revolution’ was lowercase. I asked him what happened to his idea. He told me he didn’t care.

Then he went into his room. Shut the door. I guess he wanted to keep all that joy and love in. I thought that he might watch it bounce off his walls like a rubber ball, but I had always thought of joy as some sort of liquid, so I plugged his door with a hand towel and hoped it would suffice.

I wondered whether places really sang from happiness and love. I had always liked that idea, and I liked it a lot now. I liked to think that a desert far away from us was singing for him right then. But weren’t we capable of making our own music? Nature would have to work hard to keep up with the love thrown around like free coupons. Nature was on demand.

Perhaps the world is always singing, and we grow accustomed to the sound. Maybe the song is always with us, and so we never notice it. I liked that thought, because it meant that we were all artistic to some degree and that the music that we could hear, and liked, would be extraordinary.

I hung around outside my brother’s door, because I hoped that when he opened the door the joy would gush out over me. I imagined a force all around my brother that kept him glowing and buzzing and humming. Maybe I could soak in some, grab the morsels like a bee collecting pollen. My brother came out, the hand towel popping out and dragging around the floor.

The joy gushed, and I think I heard something extraordinary.