A weaker tingle, then a spreading numbness, as you are probed and detached surgically and placed somewhere close and unknowable. Not as far removed as your spleen. A crevice, a pocket, which you watch from dimly as Richard picks up your body and slides your hand out of Gil's and leans to whisper in his ear. Gil sighs. There is nothing to look at and nothing to do and you almost fall asleep there, unburdened as you are, but stick it out long enough to see the starry sky of Hellsbells, and Earl's quiet cave-home, and the blanket he offers you— Richard says through your mouth that you won't need one, but Earl insists, so you lay on his floor on a blanket. Richard releases you then, and says that Charlie, it is almost 6 in the morning, you ought to sleep.

You sleep. It isn't difficult.

You dream.

—

You dream that you are asleep, in a thick red unsettled sleep, under not one blanket, but 50, 100, 1000, 1,000,000, blankets, under a million layers of sheet rock and soil and itching roots and a terrible infestation of bugs. Ants, fleas, ticks, mites, any little feckless biting bug. You don't know and it doesn't matter. What you know is this: you can feel them crawling in your sleep, crawling and fucking and shitting and dying and decomposing all over you, endlessly, unstoppably, pointlessly. You can do nothing about it. You are trapped in solid rock. You are angry in your sleep.

Nothing will ever be done about the infestation while your ungrateful offspring live. They introduced it, they foster it, they encourage it to spread. They have no ear for your suffering. You are immensely pleased, then, when the bugs (exactly as ungrateful as their makers) eat them alive. The sleep-fog thins. The bugs die in droves in the water. Parts of you are beckoned upward, and you gladly reach above the earth, hoping to unravel and stretch at last—

But it is not to be. You are not unencumbered. The opposite: there is a drip-drip-drip of water on your snout, and a drip-drip-drip on your tail, and the newly muddy bogged-down world bears down on you now more than ever. A parting gift from your ungrateful offspring. And you are not asleep, and cannot fall asleep, not with the now-steady flow of cold water— can only doze, pissed-off and listless, as the surviving bugs repopulate. Upon you. They scrape and itch and drill things into your spines, and there is nothing at all you can do to stop them.

—

(3/4)