Mabel episode 26, Dantz Macaw, in which our dancing slippers are worn threadbare.

GIFELB You think you are the king of the bog, of the underhill of the black wind howling between the stars?

You think you are the monster at the end of this book.

She is Saint Anna.

Anna with a mouth of God, Anna with a fist of bone.

I am the girl half burning.

I am the bull in the maze.

I am Mabel Martin.

I am coming for you. I am coming for you.

I am coming for you.

We are coming for you.

There is a girl picking flowers in a field.

Red flowers, purple flowers, saffflowers, sunflowers, clover attended by honeybees, by bumblebees,

by damselflies and demoiselle.

There is sun above her and cool earth below her, more than that there are molecules of water in

the air she breathes in and out there are precious metals in the humming of her blood there is

metamorphic bedrock beneath the top soil and below that fire in a sickly smoldering trudge

fire upon which tectonic plates shift and settle, and there is

electricity lighting her nervous system, and dead light in the sky from stars long fallen into

darkness, and the whole vast roar of the universe hinged on the teeth of abyss unfathomable,

and across the field from the girl, there is a man in black.

The man sees the girl.

...