It is an old cobblestone road. Her figure emerges in my slanted peripheral, and soon she becomes immediate. Is this how everyone else has been living? She looks so cool over there, sitting on the stoop and frowning, like a sexy stone gargoyle dried out by the sun. The world is changing—this is a changing world. I feel grounded in the clouds, beneath the sunny cauldron.

“I think you should meet me,” I say. It’s completely impersonal.

She smokes a skinny cigarette and says witchy things, like rumatumtum and bababoosh.

“Spend some time with me,” I say.

She looks me up and down and arches her back like she’s trying to see if I’m spineless and scared away. My body evaluates her as a threat. I pretend I don’t notice.

“Want a hit?” she says.

“No thanks, I quit. And I think it’s gross when girls smoke cigarettes. You have two lungs, but I want you to live forever.” My brain is a very focused, very mellow brain, and only three pounds. I wear my suit and hold my eight-dollar iced coffee like I have nothing to prove.

“Well I think you’re gross,” she says.

“Let’s scoot,” I say.

She walks with me.

I learn all about her and she doesn’t ask me any questions. She hates Central Park and only reads banned books and only listens to songs named “Skin.” She has a mother who casts spells who thinks she has psychic abilities as well. Wouldn’t tell me whether she believes in them.

At the park I call things by their wrong collectives. “It’s a bed of pigeons,” I say and point at some pigeons. “It’s a flock of flowers,” I say and point at the flowers.

“You’re not funny,” she says. I don’t care, because I think it was funny. Anyway, the truth is packing peanuts.

“Maybe you should ride your broom over here next time instead of walking,” I say.

“That’s misogynistic,” she says.

“But you have to understand, you have a great great grandmother who was killed in the Salem Witch Trials,” I say. Then I kick a pigeon.

She looks me in the eyes and pulls out her tarot cards and says some real ominous stuff. It’s all a little convoluted.

“When you wake up, there are going to be completely new people around you,” she says. She kisses the sharp of my cheekbone. My head feels heavy as a bloodstone block; it feels like she’s carving a different face out of it. I become a linoleum carpet. A serpentine sham. My heart rate drops, a lot, and then I fall into a deep sleep.

I wake up in the grass and she is gone. I am oversaturated. My brain has a bog, and I am discombobulated. I think a bunch of mumbo jumbo, have hot flashes and smell red meat. My body dries in the earth’s eight suns. I’m wandering the streets and doing things as the suns set, and I don’t know why I’m doing anything. I forget how to walk. I forget my own name. I’m scared of my shadow—especially when it dings and trickles against wrought iron gates.

I close my eyes and focus and pretend my pain is an orb and the center of the world, and everything else is what spins around it. I don’t find any of this funny. She stopped rolling with me because I forgot to tell her I could do magic too. I forgot to tell her I could change the world. I don’t know what she is; but tonight the wind shakes the air and I can hear her laughter in the distance and I can see her riding her broom with the moon as her backdrop.