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-How about Blanche?

-Blanche? she replied. She had trouble hearing, but Jean-Baptiste saw the energy in her expression; it was like the storm clouds during a sunrise, bright as wine, electric like feathers. Blanche is a maniac whose upbringing threw her brain into boiling water and then took it back out to see what it would look like.

Her mind takes the shape of a lily with the yolk snipped off. It was some time of night when the air is cool and the sky is still some shade of blue. Her personality twists. It twists without ever loving anything else. Her personality knows no geometry, such things are queer; they have never known law, nor ethic or even ettiquette, they just know.

A girl was found in hospital. Everybody disappears, that is, their shadows disappear, under the multiplicity of fluorescence. People come in for surgery and finally feel what the insides of their lungs or livers feel like if they're unlucky. Innards act like they don't belong until they burst into sores. She, only she, only those that know or know enough to know can feel their shadows burst into three pieces and grunt under swarming feet. They call her Jane. They check her expression, more quickly every day, they take her food, less and less everyday, and ask her why she doesn't eat.

-We're asking you how you feel, we just want to help.

-exactly.

In a few days, she won't even have to say that.

-Jane?

-'Xia'-kh9tth-ll9.

In a few days, people start thinking she's saying she's in shackles, or that she's asking for someone named Jacques, and more still think she's the sister of the Chinese boy across the hall.

A psychologist came in, and all kinds of people with identification badges and things and ask how he's been. Thank you. Happy Hollidays. Good luck with your research. How's your niece? What's her name again? They're saying he has what? He's no narcissist, he just has a touch of Munchhausen's. I read my children 'Gulliver's Travels' he said swiftly.

Yes.

-Yes?

-Yes.

-What did the velveteen rabbit have, she asked.

-He had a second chance.

-What did the velveteen rabbit have, she asked.

-He had a velour coat and soft stuffing.

-What did the velveteen rabbit have, she asked.

-He had a loving family who had to make a sacrifice.

The better part of an hour went along rather the same. The doctor called out some nurse. Then the two of them called somebody else on the telephone. A pharmacist received a page. The nurse looked for another woman. The other woman, who looked prettier than the nurse, took out an address book full of scribbles and doodles and phone numbers.

Calendars lined the walls and nooks. They had deep red marks to cross off days and weeks. April. May. June. August. Julian calendars are full of cruelty.

The girl, and by the way she started to enjoy the name Jane for small instances each day, thought often. Even if everyone else liked that she was thinking, she enjoyed it all the same. Thoughts pleased her, they were better than life. Better than the dragons and mermaids that really existed, more vivid than curses and blessings that people felt without knowing what to make of it. Thoughts were even better than dreams that shake the world even while people don't have a word for it. People fuck. They fuck a lot. Sometimes, they wear strange colors, they sweat in strange places, they care but don't care for it. Jane knew about things like this. She heard things, and heard of things, and her dreams told her strange things.

Life told her things.

Parents are things.

-I enjoy things to happen. Happenings are what's happening; happenings more powerfuller than I. There is a poesy to it, just the mere happening of it - it carries across and it parts the parts and departs.

Today they call what she has 'Partial Logorrhea.'