you wake up on the hour and the air is like glass around you. still and brittle, so silent you think you can hear to quiet plinks of dust swirling, tiny flickers in motionless pools of sticky light and cold dark. creep across it all so your shadow is a dancer laughing huge and terrible at you from the wall.

open a door, a window, anything to get you outside.

the wind rolls in to greet you. you are the glass, it is the blower; you feel yourself bending to it, feel it sucking you out. where? outside leaves murmur and even the lagoons of light on the road are cold and white, so different from your yellow inside light that makes the dead look slightly alive and you slightly dead. you've seen the black doll's-eyes it gives you.

do you stay in the dollhouse of stillness, laced thickly with undulating shadows that are both grotesque and enchanting? do you slip outisde into the night, fade into a shadow, get blown away into the wind?

it is the witching hour. the wind tastes of the north. you shut it out and what's left of it falls on the carpet to die slowly in the soft candelight.

i am soft wax; i am half-doll. i might step out into the wind one day, but for now i don't believe enough in fairy tales to be enchanted completely.