Overcast, cool, with a promise of heat. I am very tired as I was turning and tossing, freezing and burning all night. Meanwhile, the Irrepressible spent the entire episode trying to sit on my chest and wash his feet, and the full moon shone a semblance of day all night long.

Now, at daybreak, midnight's wispy clouds have locked into lowering grey, and the sublunary world is dim and pedestrian. The Irrepressible has given up on his feet and vanished into the poison-ivy patch. Clutching cans of breakfast Mountain Dew, bleary employees coast past in their rusted pickups and clattering minivans. The poodle circles three times on my study rug, lies down, sighs, and instantly falls asleep. Crickets sing in the invisible forest.

I want to tell you, "This is important, this is all important," but it may be nothing, it may be worse than nothing. It may simply be two comma splices and a repeated pronoun with an unclear antecedent. Indiscriminate, I reach for books. Anne Sexton writes, "She pricked a baked potato"; Christina Rossetti writes, "Snail paced in a hurry"; Edmund Spenser writes, "The man was much abashed at his boast." Every lie is the truest story in the world. The crickets are singing.