Trixie masterbated for so long one day that her entire right arm went numb. She didn't mind because when it came back to life it was all tingly and popping, as if it was full of fizz-pop-candy. She liked that candy.

"When the heart stops beating," she thought, "all will be numb and there will be no tingling to wake me." So she made a point of numbing and reviving her various body parts, to remind herself that she was alive.

Trixie masterbated for so long one day that her entire right arm went numb. She didn't mind because when it came back to life it was all tingly and popping, as if it was full of fizz-pop-candy. She liked that candy.

"When the heart stops beating," she thought, "all will be numb and there will be no tingling to wake me." So she made a point of numbing and reviving her various body parts, to remind herself that she was alive.

"I forgot once."

She told me she laid in a bed and stared at the ceiling and it was forest green. Even though her room was dark at night time, she could see the colour, and she said the forest composed sad melodies in D minor. "At once I knew I was in the forest, as I knew I was in my bed, and also near death in a grey hospital."

She felt these places, their smells and colours, and the way the air temperature made the hairs on her arm stand or fall, depending. She forgot, or couldn't remember, if she was alive.

She sat, she said, for so long, so still, that one by one, little by little, her whole body fell numb, until she lay weightless on an anonymous bed. Maybe she was just in a simple trance, but she circled the earth that way an indefinite number of times before a slight, then sudden near panic stole the peace.

She faced a dilemma. One she hadn't expected, and one perhaps too challenging for a girl of 16, but she had to choose one of the realities, lest she remain forever dead in the numbness. It was the realisation of the numbness surrounding the simultaneous perspectives that shocked her into the fear, propelling the thought to halt, trip, stop, and make a choice. The clichéd comparison would be that everything is fine until you realize it is fine, and then bam, just like that, it's not fine anymore.

She looked at the forest and she looked at the hospital and she looked at the bed, in the room, of the life she already hated. She said no to the forest, its beauty its song, the spotted owl who had already prepared hot tea for her. She said no to the hospital, its cold walls that promised her no jarring emotion, only sympathy and love, even from the flat stares of strangers. And she chose to wake up in her bed, the bed that she knew, in the house of the life she already hated.

She did this because she knew she would always be punished by fear - and to accept this she must accept her fear of the possibilities she could never try, she would never try. Her body began to wake with the exasperating buzz of denied probability. She instantly knew that her fear of death was far greater than that of just dying. She told me this before we set the barn on fire.

Stella By Bar Light [stella@klever.org]