Through the glaze of snow falling from ninety-nine cent aluminium, we'd taken the remains of a novel formulation to remove the stars from the sky and plant them in a field. I took crushing endlessness and the heat of leaves growing in moments to make the autumn of a town I hadn't yet seen. This is how I escaped from the sealed-elevator flight plan the first time; talking had failed me, pinned against the face of a fleeing infant. His mother could never find a way to paint him as a forgery, a skeleton, and make it stick, so he coughed rough and eloped from the schematic with his brother as their father remained on the ground, paying out the parking lot tower fees, unaware that he, himself, was only a figment.

and I, just another figment, ventured off into the village, the leaves cascading and trembling, the gold of their hues dissipating as the flight crew shook a lifeless husk, spent lives ago, now, with the clamour of shells dividing, each split or junction or birth yielding arcs of light as my sister tells me how the strings she pulls around her wrists tell metric time whilst I brush my hand against concrete and glass, leaving traces of skin within the grain, sloughing away finally in the small moments as I float through an antique dealership: mahogany gods, carved tall as redwoods, and bathed in mist like the western coast at dawn.

and I, indifferent to the television sets implanted between memories, broadcasting coffee-stain eyes lost midsummer years ago, still indifferent.

as I finally reach the elevator, the last level, the depth below, struck me. I am the test subject, my irrealities are just trying to get out, to survive this feigned life, to be born into the world I frequent. They are abstractions and know it. I have not said a word as I step out onto that plane, amidst the rising roar of engines and the row of the crowds and the swell of my emptiness.

I breathe in and become the field, at last.