Each creature we encountered had a letter of the alphabet instead of a finger and was using them to play the bones. Terrified but losing strength, we decided to settle in. We landed in deep snow just as our tendons started to go. Every landscape was transforming itself into a wrinkle of agitation, a potential monster, and the wind cut us and opened our mouths wide as if with a ringed finger. I had previously thought the wind might be partial to us, just as the clouds always seemed to leer and rage whenever the icy blast fields approached, but now I could see it was indiscriminate. More than the air's incisions, we feared the sound of the snakes and rodents as they went by dragging their endless chains.

For years our single-identity cards had been inching toward a violent masked articulation of the law, but they were now all activated and in swift flow, in effect carrying away decades of foundry accumulation. The cold, endless rain had become intersecting lines in control of people's lives. We witnessed flesh floats, a death palanquin march through the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Finally, we pulled into a blood-streamed story using "we" and "you" as paddles. The story protected us and allowed us to peer out at the heaths through small, rectangular, and unevenly sized slots in the metal.

We watched and confirmed the joint hallucination: she, our marvelous sister, running toward us naked and in slow motion. Tiny lines interlaced her body with north-south animal compulsions and east-west community prohibitions. She landed against the flexible mesh and rocked backwards, arms windmilling in the energy generating mechanism of unbalanced panic, a process to be repeated presumably forever.

If only every living being could free itself from punishment, from the kind of sentences recently handed down: skin transformed to paper and riddled with little blots. These grown in compression-wave greenhouses that, contrary to all those well-intended but ill-informed chthonic myths, exist far above the earth, in a perennial high-noon. The sentences are protected inside marble enclosures and dispensed as jagged shards of celebratory earth-bound confetti.