The man and the woman were talking about Africa. The man’s daughter, who had been playing in the other room, entered the small kitchen, walked up to the table at which the man and woman were sitting, placed a plastic toy of some sort in front of her father and said that she wanted a Popsicle. Only she said it: cock-sicle. The daughter had been having a hard time with the bilabial consonants. They ignored the girl. The man had only just met the woman and was trying to impress her with his political knowledge. Africa was her particular field of interest. That’s what it said in the profile on the online dating site. The woman said, “As I was saying, Sierra Leone is a deeply troubled country.” Then she nodded at this like: aren’t you equally concerned? The man tried to ignore his daughter. He was on a date and the daughter’s mother refused to help with babysitting. The daughter moved a little car around in her hands for a moment and then said, “Daddy, cock-sicle.” The woman said, “Oh,” as if she had been jabbed in the leg with a pen. A minute or two before all this cock business, the woman had been giving a detailed account of a video she had seen online of a forearm disarticulation. It was very graphic. There was blood all over her words. The man was appalled, but eager to have sex. Because of this, he chose not to say anything much about the violence. When she said, “Chopped off with a machete,” and moved her hand through the air, illustrating the machete, he only said, “How awful.” It was awful, of course, losing limbs in such a violent, bloody way. No one could deny that. But this was a kind of violence he normally didn’t think about much. Because, sure, bad things happened here for sure, but nothing like lost limbs. Not if he didn’t count the one or two farming accidents he occasionally heard about second or third-hand, regarding people’s uncles in Salinas or someplace; and here was his daughter running around on the linoleum floor talking about frozen cocks and he began to think about sin and circumstance and violence. It was all very disorienting. “Is it her mother?” the woman asked. She had a concerned look fixed on her face. It was mostly in her lips, and maybe a little in her eyebrows. “Does her mother use those types of words?” The man looked at the woman and thought about his penis. It was not frozen or disarticulated or otherwise occupied and although this was a relief, as it would be to any man, it was also a little disappointing. He began to think of his penis as if it were a root from which his body acquired nutrients. The woman said, “Some people just aren’t cut out for parenthood.” His daughter threw the car to the ground and screamed, “Green cock-sicle!” The man looked at the woman and pictured her as a farmer or a soldier or a slave—some kind of less complicated actor in a more complicated mess of events than was going on here—and he closed his eyes and listened for his daughter and all of her perfect mistakes and he thought of blood until the woman said, “It’s all so sad.” And the man touched a finger to his eyebrow where he thought he felt an itch and said, “You have no idea.”