Scene begins- A woman in a Fascinator veil holding a lachrymosa looks up at me, locks eyes, and starts to laugh. She taunts me with a cake stand. Pork Skin cupcakes. Lard frosting. Strange unknown berries. In the distance, music of an undetermined origin drifts through the Hawthorne hedges and lands, like a thoughtful bumblebee, on the top of my left ear. It tickles and itches in unified exotic languorous drone until my hunger subsides enough for me to reach my hand out for Her to playfully nip as my dusty heart beats the rhythm of a tensile machine. My sour sweat beads, rolls from my forehead to the corners of my mouth, tasting of salted copper, rusted blood, and crushed expectation. A hint of profuse discoloration forms in my tear ducts- yellow, orange- perhaps not for I am only reflected in the crystalline blits that are her tears, collected in a jar, waiting to be neatly frozen by perpetual emotional Winter. And with that, she hands me a delicacy reserved for the Diminished, the Faithless, the Upchucked, the Delirious – a circus of taste that resides in the interstices and monochromatic telepathy reserved for entelechy and distress. I swallow her acrid tears gratefully and begin shedding my calamitous exoskeleton accompanied by a paltry show tune in the flattest key imaginable, whistling like a teapot, weeping like a dry camel at a cotillion for shrunken clowns.

A nurse silently wraps my arm with an inflatable blood pressure cuff and pumps, without emotion, she asks if I have had a bowel movement. And with the tolling of a service bell, a healthy breakfast is served.

Let. The. Healing. Begin.