I was in a post-nuclear future. It wasn't that bad.

I sat by a murky pool and watched a spaniel swim. I sat next to the child who had some relationship to the spaniel. The spaniel was supposed to fetch a thing lost in the water, but lost its strength. Later I learned that the lost thing was another spaniel.

A book, not a spaniel, surfaced in the pool. I fished it out.

It was a book by Georges Perec. Or rather, it was a scrapbook by Georges Perec, made with scissors and glue sticks. It had many small works about pandas and employed, as puns, roman numerals.

One couple (vacant & professional) had recently come up from a basement in which they had spent ten years. They had had four children. One boy survived. "I could not find a place for him to die like the others," the mother said. "The others I grew tired of, but this one I could not bear to let go."