And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.

Who was this girl alone so late at nightin search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time’s intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I’ve ever met. Our love is a vine of entrails that can follow any coffin anywhere, no matter how deep any gravedigger might travel.

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with thefloating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I’m sad they’re gone…sad and blue.

This is my one last call and lullaby for this eternity. All of my medicine.

The world was alive, the sky descending; our times were lullabies and sad goodbyes.