Klonopin, cymbalta glow low in dusks of bracken. Tomaselli garden with real pills in it bled out shrubs. This is where I see him, years later. I thump the others quiet, put out your cigarettes, dimbright, stop clinking bracelets, stop chomping, he's here. He was as he'd been a little older. Twigs in his hair, like he were becoming scarecrow, or scarecrow slowly becoming human. And there was I in a variation of earlier birdlike outfits, fewer patterns, more knowingly angular, theatre of jarring neutrals. My ears twitched silver. We didn't have words. I was real, far as that goes, though this recent development disrupted what hitherto had been an easy arrangement. What's he looking at, I thought, is that aura cowlicking my head again, or were there crows. Vision pretty much stayed asymptotic, each squint approaching the other's axis like a pastoral spaghetti-western. The trees were paste, the pills falling. We were riping in reverse, wishing we could stick everything back as we'd found it. And so I scampered off with the others just before the warrens vanished. Single gleaming shape broken back into gloaming, its being evening didn't matter, nor March nor May. Branches, leaves. And sepals closing where just before there had bloomed a fairy, flower-faced, unblooming from bract like a jewel-box ballerina. She spun rusty, wand uncreaking against her dewdrop gown. She seemed to speak in reverse. The dizziness receded, dewdrops drying. The pebbles of my neck still smarted from where her wand had cracked. And there were shadows in the velvet grass. I was leaning against a fowlhouse, which at least bore the sound of logic. In the din of clucks I barely noticed molecules exchanging valentines. Blood was feathering, paling. The further horror of the event of returning to the toy version of oneself being that one can't respond. I wasn't dying, I was receding, growing softer. There was no memory of fever, there being no memory. And I was unchucked from the heap of dejecta, saved from fire, returned to a shelf, the bow around my neckfluorescent with a new vigor. The threads fraying from paws found ways back in, homecoming of glassy parasites. I was ravishing again and loved and barely felt it in the batting. Soul-swaddle doesn't know the trouble it gets into. Doesn't know all goes dark. Nor how long in stocking. Nor scent of oranges, almond. Placid sprig unknowing held in soft unfeeling arms. Nor boy approaching, stop.
