A colonial sofa with an arched wooden back; the dark drapes absorbing the light that would have saturated the living room; Ravel's Bolero playing lightly from her CD; and a fly above vher face...cacooning there, she could only focus on little monads of reality at a time: now it was pulling back the hair out of the face and toward her pillowed head; comparing her thoughts to the over-shuffling of Tarot cards flying off in all directions, the choping of meat at a butcher's shop, or the static of television stations intruding into each other; and the recent and recurrent memory of MF (visibly older but obviously easily recognizable when she saw him in the audience while making her address from the podium). For ten or eleven hours now there was pain and the slow scattering of her thoughts was as a child on a beach with a fist full of sand who discovers his souvenir has been ebbing out of the cracks between his fingers. She could not shoo away the pesty fly that was as pesty as Mormon flies (those sententious dragon fly missionaries who had knocked on her door earlier that week--Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormon flies so succulent and "so fuckable," whom she had reluctantly rejected from her door). The migraine was intense and she could only lay there in her tomb. Her sterile thoughts were filth. Her harmonic bliss in aloneness was, in illness, devestating and lonely as one suffering in solitary confinement. Within her sickness earlier suppositions about the world discomfited her. They mutated into something less than worms and hid themselves in her gray matter. Powerless--she who years earlier had been an avid racketball player, criminology and psychology scholar, and a forger of a new destiny, an individual who had made a success by embellishing her inner self in marketable products on canvas--here she was lying on a sofa unable to even successfully shoo away a fly. The weak thing she had become, she tried to suck it into her mouth. She tried to use the human mouth as a vaccum cleaner as this fly incessantly tried to land on the contours of her face. She put a hand over her face and turned on her side. "Come away with me!" she imagined MF as saying. "Come away with me, the two of us out of this pase place!" And again, as throughout her illness, the thought of him was as a light beyond the tunnel. She did not know the reason for it. She had only spoken to him once beyond the service she had initially given to the widower in her previous profession. They hadn't spoken at the funeral. Even though she could have met him again through parent teacher conferences she had delegated these sessions to Hispanic Betty.