I remember the quiet garden where the rabbits slept. A dying tree’s slow decay attracted swirls of summer flies--plump and iridescent like the black cherries on which they often feasted. The rotting-water smell provoked my Discomfort, until he finally snapped open two yellow-pink eyes and growled awake. While circling the garden--bare-footed and barren-minded--I sometimes was awoken from my thick, liquid trances by a pale thread of sunlight. The light, so foreign to a garden shrouded completely in an unctuous shade, extracted my sympathy, and I once even invited it to soothe my naked shoulders, which were roughened by several hundred goose-bumps. Within the sunlight’s silver womb I uncovered my dreams. They fluttered forth, colorful and bright-eyed, their lips cracked with widening smiles while I grimly acknowledged their presence. After all, they rekindled in me the same robust, scarlet fire that long ago nourished my graying health…I could never forgive myself for once letting them go, for once commanding them to leave.