She tumbled down the mossy slope, one of dozens in this painstaked world. Flicked a red leaf with thumb and index finger, the ice covering the leaf broke apart and slid to the frozen ground. Tomorrow she would slip beneath a large sheet of river ice to look for something to eat. Staring up at the grayness above the chill water she would spy one hundred possibilities, as well as water skimmers caught, fixed. How do you tell what's what here in the echoing forest? Pines, cypress, birch, more pine, hollies. Step-step-step. Feet tingled and went numb.

Sometimes she could barely tell if she was walking or just falling forward repeatedly. This struck her as sort of funny. Three days ago she had come unplugged from the terminal. One day ago licked hungrily at the frozen ground, tasting salt, clay. It was all she could do to keep walking. Though now, as she'd said, to someone? it was more just a series of stumbles than footsteps, really. Tumble, trip, tumble, pull up again.

The creature itself was wrapped in wolfskin. To keep the blood in and the bones, bones bound for a pool of boiling iron. They had plans for her. A rebirth of sorts. But she wanted none of it. All this had been too much. All this, not enough. Tumble down, tumble down. She touched an ear and heard an ant scaling a pebble, touched the other and heard nothing but the whoosh of circulation. Staring down at her boots, she realized they would not hold. Who knew she would be walking here, who knew that it could be different so quickly. It was not the shiny linoleum of the office hallway, not the smooth asphalt at the office park where she worked. She kicked at antlers half-covered with lichen.

Looked at another way, all of this was to be expected, all had appeared in children's books for grownups, in grownup books for children. All had accreted the resonance of age and repetition. But myth just told us where to look, that was all--it was shiny and distracting, fodder for crows. It grew in threes, snaked up trees like ivy, skyward, an invitation to hope. She sat on the ground, tore off boot and sock, inspected her foot for blisters. A small cut decorated one side of her big toe. Dark brown blood flecked with cardinal, the beginnings of a scab.

Strung between two cypress trees was an old fashioned street light apparatus. Heavy, big-globed. Still flashing red, yellow, green. She yelled something, it shocked her, that, something inchoate--was that it? The right word? How did she get here? And had it really been only three days? She missed the reassuring clickety-clack of fingers on keys, the smell of coffee, the dull sensible work at the lab.

It was clear that she would need to construct new vocabularies. Soon.

She wrapped the toe in vine, wound several times and knotted. The same vine she wrapped around the base of the boots for reinforcement. Tomorrow she would find mud to further shore up the tears and, hopefully, sun to set the approximate spackle. Makeshift solutions, sure, but there wasn't much choice now was there.

We do what we can when we can and we don't look back. Only that's not true. One does look back, eyes rolled inward, whites synapse-scorched and unseeing. If we weren't all zombies it would be a laugh, if we weren't. Someone taught me that, I don't remember who. Once you've looked back in sadness you ... But then ... And one night the stitches must out. You will walk three times around that old tree stump because you need a ritual and because the stump is more wounded than you are and besides it's there. Well isn't it? Said the wound to the injured you know nothing of pain. Still, you walk, scrape back the scab, salt the raw, sleep for a time in the afternoon sun. And when you awaken the wound's still there and you will not cannot be anything less than grateful. Because you are wise, because you are foolish. Because you, because we, look back, we look back, it's just what we do.

Cataracts are just falls, he said.