ONE
Boredom is a contagious disease and she's caught it. She sits, completely still, staring across the river. She thinks about the book she found. In it the people are so hungry that they begin to eat rats. While sleeping she has nightmares about eating rats raw, she has no way to cook them. She' searches for a way to stop her dreams. She sleeps in her clothes, ready to move at a moments notice. Her dreams keep her moving. She dreams of women lined up in the street with guns.

TWO
Some mornings she needs something gentle. At 6am she can always find the lady with the round white ass. This one watches everything coming up and down the street. A female model with no assigned job, her programming is wrong, somehow she escapes destruction. Incredible gentleness, occasionally sitting in the doorway but more often standing and waiting on the corner. She looks down the street as if expecting her ride to appear, all her belongings are in two bags at her feet. This morning the girl turns the corner to find her with her pants down at her ankles, peeing into the street, the sun bouncing off of that ass so round. For the first time in days she smiles.

THREE
This is when she sees the boy. They make their own path through an overgrown yard. The house has endless rooms and the sound of their footsteps echo. They lay on a couch under piles and piles of torn up blankets. Laying head to feet she stares at the tattoos on the inside of his thighs, Japanese writing. One side blue and one side red. Electric sensuality. It's a message directly to the inside of her brain, if only she could read it. The shapes drift in and out of focus in the soft light. They touch. They ache with silent communication. People enter the next room. They change each others socks.

FOUR
No one here is really aware of her presence due to her increasing powers of subterfuge. For her, movement is connected with the release of power. A man she knows has barred all entrances into his house. The doctors say they want to change his wife's bandages. She's dying, he's concerned with her appearance. He manages the details of a death taking years by shoplifting what he needs from the store. His wife's body rots from the inside out; he tries to hide this fact as long as possible. He's willing to pay any price for hope. She hears a woman sobbing through the walls and goes searching - hoping for something she cannot name. She enters a space, empty except for a very long banquet table lined with chairs. There is no food but the table is laid out with fine silver service and stretches the length of the building. She walks carefully down one side and back but there is no woman who needs her.

FIVE
Woman on the corner in a doorway with bandanna on her head shifting her hips as the girl passes. It's close to dawn. She starts back toward the city. She glances down to check what her feet are doing seeing a huge dead rat directly under the foot that she is so carefully placing on the sidewalk. Quickly shifting her direction, twisting the muscles in her back just slightly, in order not to fall or step on the maggot infested body. She makes the move without either disaster occurring and looks. Another rat, this one alive and hungry, stops to watch her as she passes. It holds it's ground not shifting a muscle as she slowly walks by. Something about it's posture makes her break into a run. She reaches the tunnel at high speed feeling the cement and thick hot air swallowing her. At the bottom 2 inches of chemical water float across everything. Men with rubber suits and gas masks are vacuuming the station. A breeze which shows the train's arrival makes her step back as the chemical smell fills her head. Cracked snakeskin covers all the walls. Two rats fuck in the corner. The noise of the vacuum machine mixes into the screeching of the train. She rides miles in seconds.

SIX
She hears a rustling noise that slowly gets louder. Instinctively she climbs a wall. When she looks down from her perch she thinks the ground is moving and opening up. The sound must be like the sea which she has never seen. All the rats that have been living in those buildings that no longer stand are on the move. Thousands and thousands of them, running frantically around, looking for a place to go. They have no sense of purpose or direction. She can do nothing but sit and watch until they are gone. She walks back to her part of the city cautiously, knowing the rats outnumber everyone.

SEVEN
She sits on the roof all night with a guy who tells her his dream. He was in a large house and went up the stairs. He was surprised to find two strangers in his friends room. A man and a woman, both formally dressed. They looked up as he opened the door but they did not stop talking. The woman had long straight black hair. She was extremely elegant and very tall. She had eyes so intense when she looked at me my head began to spin and I could no longer focus. Then she dismissed me as if I were an insect. She turned back to the man and they continued their discussion. She slowly turned away from both of us and transformed. Her hands and feet became talons and she grew wings out of her back. (The boy searches for words on the roof to describe his images)...It seemed totally natural on her as if this happened all the time. And she had a sword, a long bright silver sword. She suddenly flew across the room and landed on the back of the man with her talons digging deep into his shoulders. Blood began to flow down the front of him and in one quick motion she sliced off his head. It fell with a weird hard sound and rolled across the floor. It stopped right at my feet. The bird woman looked at me again and as the world started to spin she flew out the window. When she pulled her claws out of the man's shoulders his body fell and blood was just everywhere. It was weird. I wasn't sure if I had really seen it so I left the room and went back downstairs where I found my friend. I asked him to go upstairs and look in his room. I didn't tell him what had happened because I thought he would think I was crazy, I just said go up and look in your room and tell me what you see. Before he came back down the police had arrived. They went upstairs and were gone for a long time. I couldn't leave, they had the house blocked with electric surveillance. They questioned everyone in the house. My friend told them I had been the last one in the room and that I had asked him to go and see what was up there. They pulled me aside and kept saying the same things over and over...just tell us what happened...you can trust us...we're your friends. (The boy laughed.) I didn't tell them the story. I knew they wouldn't believe me but I wanted to know if she was real so I asked them what was up there. They told me that there was a body and kept asking what I knew about it. I was silent for a while and then I asked if the window was open. They said yes. Then I asked if the head had been cut off very cleanly. Everything paused here for a moment for they hadn't told anyone how he had died, I surprised them. Finally they said, yes it was cleaner than anything we've ever seen, how did you do it? They bundled me up then because I didn't answer. I didn't go to jail though, they took me to an insane asylum. They put me in this big room full of people who kept asking why did I do it and what did I use to cut off his head. She had taken the sword with her. This went on for days and days. Then it was just a couple of guys every day that would ask the questions, the same ones, why and how. Then some new guys appeared and began to tell me not to worry, I was sick and very soon would be better. These guys said I had hallucinated the entire thing and I should relax and forget. But still every day I had to talk to the other guys who were saying that I had done it and they just needed to know why and how. This went on every day for at least a year. They started to give me drugs so one day blurred into another. Then a new nurse came into my room. I usually didn't look up but for some reason I did and it was her. She just looked at me with those eyes, they were just as intense and I knew everything I had seen had really happened. Then she left without a word, she still treated me as if I were an insect. It was like she had just dropped by to point out that she was walking around wherever she wanted and I was stuck there for a crime she had committed. She didn't even seem concerned that I might finally talk - she knew there wasn't anything I could say that would hurt her.

EIGHT
She searches for her lover who exists now only in her dreams. She searches but he's become a myth; she moves through her own head as she walks. Wishing for sleep and some sweet dreams to take over the running commentary that fills her mind. Seems like days since food and she can no longer remember the last bed. Walking fills all of her minutes. She carefully places one foot in front of the other making sure that certain rules are obeyed.

NINE
She looks out the window down into the space made by the angles of two buildings coming together. Long ago someone thought it would be good for people to have windows and these little horizontal spaces are now filled at the bottom with rats. She can just see the moving bodies as the sky grows lighter. She opens the door to the street and quickly leaves. The day is a stretched cord, ready to snap with an unrelenting surface. She has no alternate route to follow. Left turn into empty alley. She looks up and nods at the two huge rats sitting on the beam above her head. Nothing you can do anymore, they are here to stay. The buildings grow as she walks into the coagulated mess. The sky becomes light, rain begins to fall and she doesn't care this morning, it's the closest she will get to being refreshed. She moves through the city looking for her old friend rat-boy. She finds him blind with parts of his brain disconnected. She can see spaces in his head that worms are crawling through. When he realizes she is there he knows that no other plans will be given to him. He begins melt into the counter of the bar. She stands and watches until she can no longer distinguish him from the wood.

TEN
She has a dream that she is on the road to freedom. She's with several people. They have to be secretive. Not telling anyone what they are doing while going about their business calmly. They stay in a large white house with tunnels underneath. It has huge beautiful rooms with only a table and a lamp sitting in the middle of the wooden floors. To get inside you walk through a wide green park with houses and buildings strewn around. It is very lush, slightly overgrown and there are several tunnel entrances scattered throughout the park so the house can be entered without being seen. On one side of the park is a dirt hill leading down to two train tracks. She's been living in the house for weeks now and is familiar with all the areas around it except this. It's raining, she slips down the hill without being seen. She can see the tops of the trains and this gives her a sense of longing for movement. She hasn't felt this since the day she entered the house. At the bottom of the hill is a sidewalk that leads to a door in a small building by the tracks. It is raining much harder now and she would like to go inside but there is a light on, this makes her cautious. She silently approaches, the door opens and an old man steps out laughing. He tells her he's been waiting there for her for a long time. He was afraid she might never make it. He sits her down next to an old stove that has a fire going inside and tells her she must memorize everything he is going to tell her. He says the two of them have had this conversation many times but she never remembers enough of it. He sets up a chalkboard in front of her and begins talking. He shows her the way out. When she wakes she remembers all of her dream except for the words on the chalkboard.