A horse emerged from the woods, sleepwalking through the fog, its eyes literally closed. The hooves of the sleepwalking horse were long and yellow and curled like the toes of elf shoes.
There was lightning in the blue windows of a treehouse, where scientists were hunched in the dark over their secrets, boiling the world down to a fluorescent ochre dust. Great shocks of thunder boomed in the sky beyond the fog and shook the treetops. Birds, concussed by the thunder, fell from the trees like dull-thudding fruit, landing on their backs.
Seven men sat huddled and miserable in a trench that was slowly filling with water. The words one of the men was trying to read to comfort his trench mates bled on the page and were carried away by the rain.
Every story, it seemed, was either forgotten or in the process of being forgotten. One of the men tried in vain to recall the lyrics to a single Bob Dylan song and, thwarted in this attempt, eventually settled for a few tentative fragments of a nursery rhyme.
Soon enough, they knew, they would all drown.
The men took turns trying to remember and describe their mothers’ smiles.
From somewhere above them, an amplified and vaguely familiar voice stumbled again and again through the alphabet.
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