By booklight, you were reading about a man with morning sickness, when a bird entered the story. The bird and the man were in the same town in the story as you. The man was camelled over the family toilet while the bird dived the outhouse and into the book you read. The bird's wings were tiny mustaches toy train conductors wear, and were smearing the track of font. The man's hand was turning his forehead into a rocking chair.

When a blue snowflake laughed onto the outhouse roof, the bird left the sentence devoted to itself youwere reading and blanketed in the page’s edge. You found him handsome.

You placed a cot in the bird’s eyes.

Dreaming a baby yawning inside you, you woke at morning under ceiling stars in the delivery room to a man on the bed's edge reading quietly a manual on building a toy railroad to heaven. He was ugly under the booklight.

Somewhere behind your ear, the free radicals of August sleep had taken the passenger pigeon with avian flu to a place before you were all born.

“Who are we?” you asked the man. “Who have we ever been?”