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He turned to bite down on a crippled old woman with a cane and a bend in her back like a stair Her skinny ar, of course she inning His invisible teeth shattered on her dry old skull, scraping off her jaw She smiled quietly to herself

“There is a pit in every dream that cannot be eaten,” I said to Rafu I was so tired This was a lesson for baby Baku “It will break you if you try it Naturally it is thein a dream, and we have all had to learn to curb our desire for it And in the drea and sleeping, an old woman sits in a pachinko parlor, our indestructible core, indestructible because she does not know she is the sweetest thing in the world”

The drea the silver drea out for help I did not care

But Rafu opened her arms to him, and ah, I should have knoe are each slaves to our own natures, even in the Paradise of the Pure Land, especially here, and if I know only how to eat, she knows only how to conceal, how to hide a thing from shame Her arms flipped open, square screen by square screen, and she enveloped him so suddenly he could not olden Rafu

The dreaan to tear out of hiht bulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlament The Seven Goddesses of Perfect Chance They burst froh the body of Rafu, which was no ed, torn threads fluttering in the breeze of falling silver

THEN I WOKE UP

It was only a dream Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born And then I woke up—it was only a dream

Stories here do not end like that I cannot wake up I do not sleep

Milo cannot wake up If she could, she would see in her house: a low table of red wood, several s, a television, chocolate, a peach, a salmon rice-ball, and her friend Chieko’s screen, shattered as though a cannonball had struck it, in a broken pile on the tataet a new one—they can always get a new anything, these humans

Only you can wake up, out of all of us, and be relieved You can assure yourself that we never really existed, that Yokosuka is only a broken oldscreens never speak with voices like thread spooling I will leave it all intact for you

I a now, anyway I have my penance to pay

Yet eating dreaement in the Paradise of the Pure Land I did e of the dreae of Milo, sodden with seawater I cleaned everything up, don’t you see? It’s all just the way it was before

On the 6:17 coeisha ouldn’t wear her wig It rambled and was not funny Yatsuhashi-san is an idiot The apartone She was never here, of course—I never brought her to my threshold, I never served her tea with the exquisite abasement of which I am capable I never showed her the jellyfish But once there was a glowing cord between our houses, hers tataolden and tall, just down the hill from Anjinsuka Station, ey, devoted snout But in drea that never was, and so can I

Rafu will never come here now; the emptiness is permanent