As I entered the galleries of fish, I met with a perfect perplexity. Jailed there between even balances, I could see an apron trailing. How many wanderers would reach for that parchment, in their jubilant yet hopeless foray? I could only wish I wasn’t one of them, those jawless creatures that inhabit the traces of wine and milk. But an infestation is calling. It sweetens the ear to spill it and then to wash as one enthralled by the clouds, among a conglomerate of surrogate children.

The print in the dust, solidly unraveling, separated from my heel as it left the former poles. It could not foresee that I would mold another, nor would it prevent my absconding, as its furthest point was transfixed between the shadows of momentary annihilation and a beam from the eye of a crucifix upstanding. That joint proximity, held steadfast, would claim the entrance of another in passing cycles. And just when we thought the worm had touched its linear horizon, the doors would play on their cuboidal hinges and allow the passage of those tunneling labormen.

Colossal anterooms, crowded by sweating lovers, felt themselves rolling toward a fixed axis. Centered therein, beside a bloodless estuary, cannibals and cutlery mingled. At one time I applauded their sanguine identity, but they send forth curses in their tearing and silhouetted, attain a prominence where even children’s games shift wearily. Like potsherds cracking was the melody. Two out of three collapsed laughter into bottles. Freely spread, such swine titters softly.

Staring at my hand, I noticed each fragment crumbling, a thousand tiny particles littering the floor in their autumn. Perhaps these branches needed cutting?

But first that anchor white, shielding the woman from an army of suggestions. I fell on its lucid plane to find myself surrendered to a tumultuous space wherein the air entangled me. And like a vessel, whose ribbed sails drawn tight, is yielded to a forceful current, so my body became victim of a motionless plummet. This bubble, a white egg, gave new sanctuary. I aimed to climb back that steel wire stretching endlessly toward origin. Surely there was one, who, having snapped firm at the utter breadths, gained the strength to grasp its string and tug itself backward. Certainly there are heroes who fought to return to the nothing before, but who would remember them? Their names, like the whiteness, have faded back to causality.

This duel would end as it began, I suspected. The march. The draw. The meeting. And I found myself back to back with myself in the same place I had been. But there was still duplication.

Can never this division be canceled?

So we met eye to eye, ear to ear, then breast to breast and suddenly—the tremor! It awakens the soul to the innermost etchings where the grandest elixirs pour foul. These vapors, amplified to such reverberations as to convulse the psyche, deal their cards of trauma in pairs. Not a hand is revealed that isn’t placed in storage for a summer day when the wind reverses. There are no losers in this tournament.

Hanging by my trophy, half severed from myself, I plunged the ingrown follicle to my heart. The shattering was complete in its finality. That sound, my scream, relapsed to its source.

The marble-colored woman gathered up the garment, glaring angrily thereon as though seeing me at its time, clinging beyond the moment of being, then made her way to the ovens. It couldn’t be helped, she thought, so she tended to the beggars. They would sleep warm beneath her glowing rods and she’d poke them ready, but not a moment too soon.

By and by the apron threads will loosen. It’s the frayed edge of men that joins them to her seam.