Author's Notes. This is my attempt to write something in the vague style of the literary periodical Noon, something that perplexes me (on purpose, I have no doubt) and compels me in my befuddlement. If you don't know what Noon is, you're probably not missing out on anything. If you do… well, you probably hit the back button the moment I claimed that the entire journal has a single writing style.

Disclaimer. If it was mine, the finale would've had a full-on liplock during the end, and you can quote me on that. As it stands, it's not, so it didn't.

At times I can hear my family's dogs barking which I can still hear in Applesauce's voice, and the beating of my brothers' big feet on the floor, an alarm for the morning in of itself. Will Graham, when he says he ought to cover himself, standing in thin-sheer shirt and shorts, looks out to the yellow grass and I think but only think how he doesn't need to but my upbringing has nothing to do with it.

I have forever been falling.

Alana Bloom, Dr. Lecter says, when the autumn shroud makes the sky a dark plane and gives the John Hopkins campus a tense grandeur, You have my utmost congratulations. I grin, and let myself flush, slightly because I know what everyone else is saying. To be the lady-made-it with the perfect man, but that doesn't happen until years later, after I buried dog hair covered profilers under assessments of instability and five murder charges. It's the best mistake I'll make.

The shattering glass is the score to my dreams sometimes, and I wrap myself in padding, houndstooth, metal frames, feel out the syllables of marrow entered the bloodstream, it's a physiological change in the palate of my mouth. I am dead, and I hold her at night because the coin can turn at any time, but I keep him in a replica office of my old and when we talk I see.