"Hnmuh?" I said, or something a lot like it.

My body was tired. So was my brain. Tired enough that I was having trouble getting a grasp on much.

I was mostly naked, just in my panties. I was somewhere warm, comfortable. Sitting. Warm. I know I mentioned it, but it was on my mind.

I felt like I was dreaming. Maybe I was. There was that weird, surreal, unreal feeling in the air. My breath felt too smooth, but the echo of it in my head felt too loud, too sharp. The carpet under my toes didn't make sense, but the soft fabric of whatever I was sitting on was completely comprehensible.

The voice around me continued, pulled me forward, without me ever moving a step. I was still sitting but I was travelling. I was silent but I was talking.

But, but, but. Everything was but. Nothing could be solid without a 'however.'

Which meant nothing could be solid.

The world was fluid, spectral.

So was I.

In the distance, I could hear fire. I could almost feel it.

I was halfway down the hill, and gravity was resisting my inevitable climb. The lighter I got, the harder gravity tried to reassert itself.

Exhaustion wouldn't let me stop. Stopping was too tiring. Up and up I went, up and further up, with the end always in sight and out of reach.

I was the rock of Sisyphus. I was the boulder, the punishment—well, the mechanism of punishment. I was the weight that needed to be sent up the hill, day after day, night after night, step after step after step, that could never reach the end of someone else's journey.

The voice couldn't lift me to the top of the hill. No matter how light it made me, I was bound to come back down.

But gravity was fighting, too. I could lift against it. I could fly from the flames. I could rise into the sky. I would be neither at the top of the hill, nor down in the valley, but somewhere else entirely. Snippets of the children's tune about the grand old Duke of York, who was neither up nor down because he was halfway up the hill, drifted dreamlike through the strains of "Fly from the Flames".

The grand old Duke of York had ten thousand men. I just had one.

My phone alarm went off, as it was meant to, and I almost reflexively slapped the spacebar on my laptop, pausing the music that was playing and leaving me a little breathless and much more awake than I had been a moment before. I grabbed the pencil on the desk and immediately started transferring the image in my head to the blank page of the sketchbook, pausing only to make sure that I hadn't accidentally left it open on, or turned it to, a page that I'd already used.

I remembered a story of Salvador Dali, who supposedly got his ideas for his paintings by dozing off in his armchair while holding his keys over a metal plate. When the keys hit the plate, he would wake up, and sketch out what he saw in the half-dreaming state he had fallen into. I was experimenting, trying the same thing with different media and different purposes.

Manu wasn't the only person in my life capable of mad science. Turns out I had a taste for it, too.

I imagined myself as the boulder, but I didn't know who took the role of Sisyphus in that analogy. Who was pushing me up the hill? And why? And was it a punishment for them, as it was for the ancient Greek? What else would it be?

Too many questions. As usual.

The fire was a distant memory at the bottom of the page, down in the valley, and I was idly drawing clouds from some of those questions when there was a knock at my door. I perked up, not expecting anyone.

I was sitting on my desk chair, naked but for my panties, and I wouldn't have been wearing those but it was still that time of month. There seemed to be a certain allowance in the way the Presence (and I was thinking of Her that way) interacted with me, and certain concessions could be made if there was good reason for them. Still, I wasn't about to answer the door like that, wearing underwear or not.

"Yeah?" I called from my seat.

"Hey." It was Rita. "Was sitting in the lounge thinking about supper and I heard your phone alarm go off."

"Yeah?"

"And I heard you dreaming."

I nodded. "Okay."

"Debated knocking on your door, but eventually I kinda figured you'd be getting hungry."

"Just you out there?"

"Yep."

"Safe to talk then?" I grabbed the sweatshirt I had worn to my afternoon classes and started pulling it over my head.

"About anything you like."

"I didn't," I began, looking for a pair of sweat pants and finding them, "uh, make any actual noises you could hear, right?"

I heard Rita's giggle. "No, you didn't make any weird sounds. But I could sure feel the creative energy."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Alright, be out in a sec."

"I'll go sit."

I emerged a moment later, still barefoot but more properly attired. Rita was dressed pretty much as I was. Pinker, with the school logo across her chest, but otherwise? Sweatshirt and sweat pants, just two dorm-dwellers being comfy on a Friday night.

"So what's up?" I asked, taking a seat facing Rita.

"Like I said, was sitting here thinking about supper and I heard you dreaming." Her expression flickered to one of concern. "How are you doing?"

I shrugged. "I mean I'm fine. Just... Overwhelmed."

She nodded. "Yeah, I... I think we all get those moments."

"You, too?"

"Me, especially." Rita stretched, and my eyes registered the rise of her shirt over her stomach as she did. She had lost a little weight, noticeably, since the start of the year, but it didn't seem like it was unhealthy at all, just that she had continued the path she had started over the summer in getting in better shape. I wondered if that was a path I would ever go down. My stomach grumbled.

Rita smiled a bit, perhaps aware of my gaze, or of my growing hunger. "Wanna talk about it over dinner?"

"Sounds good to me." I sighed. "I have a long habit of isolating myself when I get stressed. I should maybe stop that."

"Maybe." Rita got to her feet and offered me a hand up, which I took. Her clasp was friendly and warm. "You need much?"

I shook my head. "Just footwear and my purse."

"Sounds good. Don't worry about pay. I wanna go somewhere off campus, and I've got a little extra to spend, so it's on me."

I blinked. "I'm getting treated a lot lately."

She laughed. "Enjoy it! Besides, I don't want to eat alone. Self-isolation is a bit rough."

"Where's Soleil?"

"She has other plans tonight, other friends to hang out with." It was her turn to sigh. "I'm so used to being around people, a Friday night alone feels... I dunno."

"Yeah, Friday nights can be quiet. Everyone's got things to do." I headed back to my room.

"I'll go grab my stuff," Rita said to my back. "Meet you at the front door."

As I sat on my bed, pulling on socks, my brain started racing. The seer had information, of course, but I just had my growing paranoia, which meant I had to wonder if Rita was planning something. What, I couldn't know; I didn't really know the extent of her (or my) power, so I didn't know what she might be planning to do to me, or with me. And I couldn't know if she just wanted to talk. Or maybe, possibly, she just wanted to have a friendly dinner together.

The fact that Rita had admitted attraction to me, and that she had told me that if I wanted to act on that attraction she would be more than game, complicated that calculation. My body's general upset made things a little worse. My stomach was churning a little, my hand was trembling, and I recognized how much of what I was dealing with was irrational.

I looked over at the picture of the boulder halfway to the unfinished questions in the clouds. I stood there, one shoe on, just... looking.

Feeling. The paradoxical calm of the image. It seemed to soothe whatever was rising in me. The sound of Tempest's rough electro-folk wail fluttered up into my mind. The pencil was just... sitting there. Waiting. A couple of the questions completed themselves, drawing the flurries and flutters on the page in my imagination, and I knew how I wanted the whole thing to look. It would just be—

My phone blipped at me. Right. Rita.

I checked the text message that came in.

Have you had enough time to calm down?

I heard the giggle in the message.

Bitch, I typed back, with a grinning face after it. Yeah, I'll be down in a sec.

The seer clearly knew what I'd been up to, and that I needed an interruption or I'd never get downstairs. I gathered the rest of my things, turned back just before I left my room with only one shoe and put the other on, ignored the sketchbook, and headed down.

"Car'll be here in a couple minutes," Rita said as I stepped out of the dorm.

"Great, uh, sorry about—"

She shook her head, cutting me off. "I totally get it."

"There's a... a question."

"Yeah?"

"I... wonder... just what the limits are of... all this." I took a breath. "Like, what exactly can you, or I, or Tempest or whoever, what can we do?"

"Like, say, make yourself invisible while touching yourself in public?"

I blushed, hard.

"Sex is an act of creation," Rita said, completely unperturbed by my embarrassment. "It's not surprising that it's so tightly linked to art, right?"

"You mean, like—"

"Not just pregnancy. I mean, of course there's that, but sex creates connections, intimacy, relationships, attachments. It's a building block of so many things. It's why the Presence expresses Herself in sexuality as well, why our expressions of art are so full of sexual subtexts." She smiled at me. "It's why so much is made of romances and unrequited love and..." She shrugged.

"Okay." I nodded. I understood.

"So... to answer your question..." she paused and looked at her phone as a car turned up the road towards us. "Yeah that's our ride. Anyway, you can't really alter physical reality, but mental reality is fair game. Imagination, right? That's what art does."

The driver pulled up and we got in. I wanted to keep asking questions, but it didn't feel like a conversation that should include people outside our little circle. Rita seemed to understand. The ride proceeded in silence, mostly, until I spoke up. "Hey, I know this neighbourhood, I think. Where are we going?"

"Nice place down by the river. When I'm feeling a little down or lonesome I go there," Rita answered. "Don't worry about the price, like I said, I'm good and I got you."

I looked across the back seat at her. "Lonesome? You?"

She laughed. "I'm not always surrounded by friends, you know! Sometimes all this can make things a bit solitary."

The driver pulled up in a small parking lot near a strip mall and let us out, then headed off to wherever he was bound to next. "All this?" I asked as we stood on the sidewalk outside a quiet upscale café.

"All this," she replied. "Last year I was a kind of a quiet nerdy kid with big theatre energy, right? I made friends to hang around with, but sometimes I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't know how to make those connections properly. Now... Yeah, uh, magic. Knowledge. It... Sometimes it can alienate people as much as drawing them in."

"So you wanted a—"

"Quiet dinner with a friend who understands, yes."

I chuckled a bit grimly. "I don't really know how much I understand."

"More than you think," Rita replied, her eyes twinkling. And maybe there was a little bit of fire in them. "Maybe less than you know, but more than you think."

I sighed, but was smiling as I did. "Maybe if you wanted more friends you should stop being so fucking cryptic."

She laughed. "This is a pretty quiet and private place, too, I may be able to answer some more of your questions."

"So long as they're not the wrong questions," I added.

"That's right."

The sound of a ringing bell and the sliding of doors gave me a momentary panic attack, but a soft voice said it was fine, that we would be taking the stairs.

Someone asked if I was alright, and all I did was giggle.

There was the taste of a truly excellent sandwich.

"You're damp," said Manu's voice, and I explained.

"Wait, so, I could just... lose time?"

We paused on the third landing and I asked where Rita was.

"Look, I think maybe you—maybe we're—coming at this all wrong."

I was very curious about the trance states Rita had been talking about, how she'd felt looking at my mirror-steam flowers, how she and the others had felt in the lounge while I was reciting poetry.

Hands were in my hair. Running through it, playing with it, curling the short strands around strong fingertips.

Two more kisses. Not alike at all in tension or taste or time of day.

Everything was dissolving into forgetfulness and little moments. I couldn't understand all of what Rita was saying as I sampled the ice cream.

Sending a text message. Receiving one. Confirming a schedule.

It wasn't dark enough yet for stars. It was dark enough that it felt private.

"'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'." That was Rita, but she was quoting William Blake at me.

At me.

Chaotic energy flowed around us. I couldn't tell who 'us' was at that point, but the chaos was certain.

The boulder started to fall, once more, towards the fire, the one pushing it unable to stop it no matter how much effort was put in.

Two kisses. I could count them, but I didn't feel their order at all.

It was... hands. Motion. Movement and taste and words and direction. But hands. Not a touch, not a touch I could feel, but a touch I could sense, could understand. Instinct guided me from response to response and

A fork with heated apple cake and cold vanilla stretched out to eternity under my nose and did so again on my tongue.

Scribbles on a notepad with a pen. Scribbles and scribbles. Words, not images, but words I meant for myself.

"Is that what you feel?" I asked him. I didn't hear his answer, not right then.

"Tell me how you felt," I asked her. I didn't hear her answer, not right then.

I directed myself, and Rita followed, and we sat, and the evening grew longer and quieter away from others.

"Why don't I know what I should do?"

The clouds told me.

"'The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom, no clock can measure,'" I replied. "You quote Blake, I quote Blake."

When she started to talk about the flowers, I knew what she was feeling, and I could reach out and just...

I heard him moan, and call me 'Chameleon,' and I knew I was getting what we both wanted.

"It's less lost," she said, "and more unglued, I suppose. It's a feeling that a thousand little, significant things are all happening at the same time."

Manu nodded as I undid his pants. "I... yeah, I think I understand."

I felt her face, my fork, his fingers, the fabric of my shirt, the stone of the fountain's edge, my breasts and hers and his, the grass and the fallen leaves and the bark and the whole world in my palms, a feast for my hands and my whole being, enlivening my spirit through the veins running down my wrists, filling my heart with so much joy and love and energy and

Connection.

The grass was my hair was the ice cream was the water was the seat under me and the words coming from me and the warmth spreading in my mouth and the flames and the love and kisses and the whole world, the whole world was nothing more than the two people with me and the power all around me and me and so much me and the energy growing inside me waiting to burst out into the world and the autumn that would give way to winter and spring and the love that would give way to so much more love and the past future and present all collided into an orgasm of fire and purity and association and adoration and laughter and tears and music I wasn't hearing and all the sex I'd had in five years and the words that Rita was saying and the flowers she built up in my mind and connection, so much connection, all the connection with her and with him and with them and them and everyone and everything and Kat's thought that we don't consider magic enough and oh, oh it was glory and wonder and even mundane stupid things like doing laundry flooded my head and spun into fire and a whole evening just... just burned. Just burned in the performance Rita started in the café while I was eating my sandwich and continued as we walked through the park together and sat on the edge of the fountain and as she pressed down on me and we leaned a little too close to the water while we kissed, and her statement that she could—and I could—indulge herself in the magic of her art from time to time, and how she took me, walked me to Manu's apartment building and called him with my phone and passed my care and the conversation to him, and our climbing the stairs and making out and me stripping him down and giving him head and...

I awoke out of my stupor about midnight. I giggled at the fairytaleness, the Cinderellalike of it, and Manu, snuggling with me and half asleep, asked me what was up.

"I think," I said, "I just touched the whole universe."

His nod ran his nose against my jaw, and made me hope for kisses along my neck, which I got and made me shiver all over. "I don't know," he murmured in my ear, "if I should be thrilled or disappointed that you came harder during that blow job than when I ate you out the other day."

I laughed. I couldn't do anything else. I was so... full. Everything was so much that I couldn't contain it anymore.

An echo of the earlier evening, sitting in the café, eating our food, came back to me, and lulled me into sleep.

Rita, telling me how the flowers felt. Acting it out. Making me, making me understand, slowly, over the course of the appetizers, the sandwich, the dessert, how it felt to be in that trance in the showers, or in the lounge when I had been reciting. Pulling me ever so close to the fire that was burning all around me and in my dreams.

I allowed myself to be in that dangerous place. I let her bring me there. I let her call to me.

I wondered, as the last of my consciousness slipped into the night, how badly I might get burned for it.