Acid rain fell from the sky. Rain like a woman’s long black hair. It was the kind of suocating rain that, if you ran through it open-mouthed, would get caught in your throat and choke you. But the dadazim had no mouth. Instead, ve crimson lilies bloomed on his back. Protruding from within his body, these sense organs unfurled their bugle-shaped petals, nearly eight inches wide. Dozens of golden tentacles stretched out from deep within each blossom’s center. Moist now aer so long without rain, their esh trembled with pleasure. Many months without food and water had altered the dadazim’s appearance to an alarming degree. His external cells had begun to shrivel up and die as he crossed the wilderness, and he was starting to show his true form. He had endured an awfully long time. Almost all the fat in his body had been converted to energy— just enough to keep him alive. His core powered his movements. All other energy he devoted to his surface, to maintaining his form. How fragile cell systems were . . . He welcomed the rain. Its acidity meant that the city was near. His brain was nearing meat.

I was talked into buying land in the middle of nowhere—a place too deserted to be considered a suburb. It was incredibly vast and quiet, just as the realtor had said. e place was in fact so isolated that it would be dicult to get to town in a car without an auto-navigator. It was so enshrouded in silence that without music, you would eventually start to hear things. I haven’t decided yet if this is a “good” environment for a writer, or just an “average” environment—but at least it’s not a “bad” environment, or so I tell myself. I purchased a top-of-the-line house and had it placed directly in the center of the lot. Since the men who linked this big house to the land le, I don’t think I’ve seen anything else move. Just some silver grasshoppers. I opened the cellbook that I had just ordered. I like reading on my pocket-sized reader, commonly known as Hoopers Design. Its only aw is that it’s slightly heavier than a paper book, but I like the fact that it doesn’t multiply the way that paper books do. e electronic le is displayed on my reader, shaped just like a book. e le is sent to my terminal from the bookstore in town. It takes less than two minutes; I simply plug the reader into the cartridge slot and wait. If I wanted to, I could also print it out and have it nicely bound, but I rarely do, unless it’s a book that I particularly like. Today I’m reading Appetite and Reason, which has been hovering in the top three rankings for some time now. e subject matter piqued my interest, so I decided to leaf through it. For background music, I chose Erik Satie’s “ree Gymnopédies.”