Kris goes to a neon sign shop to pick up a sign for her employer. The shop is dark, and the neon bender, Tullio, sits hunched over some materials, crafting with expertise. Kris has met him once before and seems entranced by his dark eyes and serious demeanor. He tells her that the sign is not ready yet and that she should come back the next day to pick it up. She gets home late and finds her husband in their barn making clothes for some wooden dolls. He has eighty dolls, all forty-nine inches tall, and they look very realistic. Kris calls her husband's name and he seems to be confused. He grabs her and sniffs her, which she seems uncomfortable with, but used to. They scuffle for a minute and then he pees on her bare feet. She goes to bed and wakes up with him beside her the next morning. She goes to Tullio’s shop again that night and he shows her how to blow glass and teaches her about neon and the other noble gasses. She is hot in the shop and so Tullio invites her to go swimming with him nearby. She doesn’t have a bathing suit and so she goes skinny dipping in the dark. He takes her back to the shop as it begins to rain. They have sex on the couch and she stays with him for a few days until she returns home. She expects to find her husband in the barn, but sees that the barn has been washed away as the river has risen with all the rain. Later, as bodies begin to float up from a nearby cemetery, Kris goes to help and identify the bodies. As she is wading in the water, she begins to see the husband’s dolls float all around her, and many are assembled to form a sort of raft. The husband is dead on top of the wooden bodies and as he hits a tree branch his body deflates with all of the gasses that are inside of him.