Peddlers found her loathsome, wrote home in codes they had fashioned themselves for the purpose, hoping to forgo the embarrassment of public ridicule, of conspiracies multiplying like locusts. Her shirt opened up down the back with the merest accidental brush of the hand or even a forceful exhalation like that which occurs when your airwaves fill up with mucus. She stated on record that her name had changed from the time when we knew her, but we thought this an almost unforgiveable transgression and went about making our feelings known by spelling them out with letters clipped out of magazines and arranged on yellow sheets of paper big as a window, the stars clumping together overhead as if they had only recently discovered our presence and wished to observe us before anyone else got the chance. Visions become so common in circumstances that might seem at first extraordinary because the air is thin or the sirens have been wailing for twenty minutes, but really they are a record of the human mind from the time of its inception to just before its annihilation, and when we heard that the twilight was more than just a meteorological phenomenon, our hands began to shake and any empathy that had, to that point, accumulated, was run through like water in a sieve. Or the syrup one finds in a can of pears. Which is to suggest more slowly than you might have at first anticipated. I bought her a ring that looked brilliant under artificial light but lost most of its luster early, in the pre-dawn hours when the sun isn’t so much ascending as hovering in place like an insult and she told me the bark on the trees had been speaking to her again but she knew better than to take what it said seriously because she had gotten in trouble like that so many times before. Our reactions slow over the years until they can’t really be called reactions at all and their replacement is something like the instincts placed naturally into butterflies which make them veer about from one place to another from birth (or, at least, their emergence from the cocoon) without ever really lighting on anything for more than a second or two, this being, apparently, the most successful way to keep them from getting consumed by whatever is immune to their toxins.