A dour pewter morning after a night of dense rain. She goes for a run but her body is not willing; legs like cinder, heart like a drum. She comes upon a pair of legs, and just a pair of legs, dangling, glistening from a nave of singed oak leaves. They are attached to a young man buried from the torso. He sprawls in the leaves laconically. Are you ok, she asks, what are you doing. I might be dying, I think. But if so, just leave me be. Leave me if I’m dying, please. When she starts to run again, she is disembodied and she absolutely flies. Her legs have vanished like apparitions in sunlight. Her heart? Well, it is not her heart, nor anyone’s heart. It simply ceases, for a while. Inert as a skeleton after death. She runs without cadence or rhythm, and her form falls utterly apart. She is the nostalgic sugary hymn of maple leaves. She is the sensuous scarlet malt of a dogwood. She is moving without being, or she is being without having to move. It doesn’t make sense. It is a new sensation, a thing not of dreams or of fantasy, or even of childhood. It’s death, approximately. It is the diffuseness. The leaves are a carpet of garnet now, and she feels her feet pounding down. Beauty dispersed from above only to wilt and languish. A maple leaf, deeply bloodied, flutters into her path, and in a motion of enormous, improbable grace, she reaches forth and it settles into her palm like the finger of a newborn. She clutches it for a few steps, and her heart is ratcheting clumsily again, her calves tugging her into the muddy earth. She lets the leaf finish its last, lovely plunge into oblivion. She stops, panting, and vomits into a dormant azalea.