I was approached by an extinct thing. Appearing in my wintry yard, and ambling forward with a gait that was jealous to its left, in its eyes I recognized an envious zeal, the same common to all things dispossessed of the life we love to hate. When me it finally reached, its shoulders slouched, and in meek obscenity slowly its mouth it unfurled. It spoke to me in grating tones:
1 "I was born beneath a huge, black rock, that heedless intruded on the air that swam around it. My den was cold, damp, and dripped with the echo like to the sea floor. When it rained, the black rock wept. Despondency fell in cords off its face."
2 "I was born of a woman and have been consumed as one."
3 "I moved to a cottage by the seaside, where I kept warm by my iron hearth and wrote copiously. I drank tea, and enjoyed watching the sun set on France far over the whitecapped waves. In the winter I would cork my walls and wrap myself in heaps of blankets, the patchworked quilts of my grandmothers, and odd flannels. My nose I would stick in a glove."
4 "I once wanted to buy an ermine coat, but when I felt it jockey for position around my neck, I screamed. It fell to the floor, where it wriggled, and I fled."
5 "Your religion is untrue."
6 "Where the dunes wash into the sky is where I buried my mother after she died. The tint of red red rubies was in the sand and the sky was pink. Descending I looked up to where the dune crested its wave, and where I had marked the grave. The wind, catching the sand, flung it off in wisps into the evening sky, and as I turned at last to go, I saw the geese, flying in skeletal bands, stretched out, heading far, far north."