I walk down the *****, populated hallway with the vines growing inside and out of it and I see my reflection in each passing door. I live just down there — not five feet; hardly taller than me, but not older. I exemplify my worries of the dark by shivering away, jammering teeth and tingling coins in pocket screaming familiar songs into my ear.
       A door opens, and for a second, we all hear the universe: all of us, out in the hall. A crystalline rod – the thin kind they use in labs or bars to stir drinks together (both of which are alchemy) – snaps, pouring a silver liquid into the hand of the person who leaves his room. With insanity he glowers at the speed of the gods. Echoes of the word “quicksilver” mutter down the hall, motors flare, and explosions go off.
       Each room is the same, but different: infinite capacity with different chemicals, different chemistry, and different emotion.
       Afraid, I turn the **** of my own cell, and I enter one billionth of myself, and I am myself. Stammering within my own mind, I quell my heart with symphonies of norm, letting flow thousands of flying fish from the forefront of the fantastic sound.
       It does not matter that other people have the same room as I do; it only matters that their rooms are different. Their rooms are cages, as are their hearts, as are their hands. The man in the hallway (short, stubby thing with eyes like a deer) blows ether from his mouth upon the liquid metal in the palm of his digits, and it floats down the way like baking powder or how I’d always imagined snow would look in a blizzard. I can hear all this, and I must divide myself from the whiteness it brings. I hate the bleak mornings it makes.
       I would like to open the door and show the silver-to-white stuff that I, too, can throw a gust at things and have them take flight, but it is not the same. Today is a world with solemn toast -- intimidating those with brains.