Everything has a red and gold halo. You move your hand in front of your face. You can see the air rippling as it moves, and a thousand iterations of your outstretched fingers as they skip across time-space. There's a shadow that moves with them. You reach out in front of you and grasp a pale leaf. You curl your fist around it. It feels impossibly small. You pull it toward you. The thin stem snaps. You feel it pull and release with a quick jerk. You gasp. You open your hand, and the leaf falls. It drifts through the air. It convulses in the breeze, buckles and twists. Small wings, translucent like crepe paper, burst out of its crumpled body; then leg leg leg leg leg leg head and its wings churn like a machine and it buzzes up and up and gone and you look at your palm and it's smeared with green and blue gel-like fluid and you watch as the fluid disappears and in its place is nothing: a hole through your palm, through your hand, empty space you can see behind it hazy air thick with smoke and the plant and the ground beyond and rimming the edges of the hole flesh and muscle and bone in cross section and you clench your fist and open and the hole is still there and you nod a small nod and smile because this is the world.