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twig-thin bodies, third degree burns blistering and untreated, run like Olympic racers but with no sense of direction, nowhere to go. In one version of the dream, there is a diminishing jungle, the type seen only in movies, recreated in Hollywood back lots or on golf courses in the Third World; the jungle is chock full of animals though all of them are oddly silent; all their larynges have been severed; even the crickets and the cicadas do not make a sound, their legs amputated. The only sound is a pitiful whining and yelping, and the high-pitched whine gets louder and shriller and fades away and returns all year around, unceasingly; and the animals and insects sit where they are, transfixed by this sound which goes on for years; and no one moves for years.
    That was my recurring nightmare, my regression. My parents employed specialists and nurses, psychologists and mystics to lure a life out of me. They tried bribes of sweets and cash, threats of beatings, but nothing worked, the world of my nightmares stained its indelible scrawl in my immature mind, leached in, spread too vast, too hooked to draw its talons out. The parents threw their hands up in defeat. Let the little bastard be , they eventually declared.
    It was then I met the soon-to-be husband. He was a visiting houseguest, newly emergent in his time. His breath smelled of tarnished metal even then.
    One accidental whiff of that metallic burr of his mouth and I wanted to vomit but my stomach was empty, and still somehow, his funny loose ways flexed me, and I was finally bespoke in my still clasped clench.
    From then on, I saved my newly pupated life for the suitor-to-be-husband who waited as patiently as he did. Weather permitting, when the grass was cut, we lay on the damp ground, looking at clouds and all manner of flies; I enjoyed rolling around the lawn like a hedgehog. It was in this state that I thought I might conceivably love him in some manageable way.
    When I was years older, I imagined every excruciating detail about my shadow life ending. I crawled into my head and saw such simple uncomplicated dreams in all their crossed-haired wires, and so, nothing more. But that tarnished metal smell shocked me as smelling salts would, jerking me back to ground zero zero point zero one.
    On that last night, did he, metallic gums and all, mumble, there will still be time for salvage . (At least that was what I thought I heard.) And like a dream, I the somnambulist slowly climbed each rung of deep sleep, rung until the end of days.
    Sleep-paste worn off my eyes, I jumped back into my life; the husband was gone, left for another, a younger more innocent one. And my awful sibling twin, silent when I was, and still silent when I was not, did indeed die soon after. She breathed her last sighing breath and drooped from my tailbone, never to be missed, never to be answered to.
    4.
    I saw heretics at a wedding: great ugly behemoths casting a rain of rice and brimstone on the unfortunate couple.
    The groom in tails and tie, carnation in buttonhole, dashes down the aisle with his bride, a mob of white lace flying behind, a super-hero’s cape if that’s what heroes are reduced to these days. The rice grains burn as harsh as acid rain, scorch the guests and the minister, but the happy couple, protected by their unyieldingly sure devotion, were unharmed. The rings exchanged were ancient finger traps designed to amputate clean below the knuckle; the minister was a pederast fucking the flower girls and the pageboys behind a tapestry of the Virgin Mother receiving her immaculate conception, her cunt juices flowing so freely in rivulets down her legs, stray dogs would lap it up and pigeons would bathe in it, devotees collect the ichthyic fluid in goblets and in thimbles, and make communion from it. At the reception, the cake was spiked with ground glass; the punch was poisoned with latex emulsifiers; the salmon finger sandwiches harbored salmonella and bread mold.
    I saw