We are a collection of paper skulls, lit from within by candles. There is also some kind of a bird, and a hammer, and a large cube. Nobody understands what it’s like to be a paper head, all hot inside. Although there are vents of a sort, the candles make smoke, and the smoke is like dreaming. We smoke ourselves, slowly, because we can’t really ‘do’ anything other than be lit from within.

One time the bird caught on fire, and water came from somewhere and messed a few of us up. I am the one that can speak. The others can’t even do that. The hammer portends doom, but doesn’t move, although sometimes I think I see it shivering.

As for the cube, it is foreboding. All angles and articulations. Nothing like a paper skull. Sometimes I envy the bird. Or the ones that cannot speak. Strange shadows happen in the darkness. From our teeth. From the holes where, were we real, noses would be. From arbitrary crevices in our construction.

We are a collection of paper skulls. There are some ashes where the bird was. The hammer is shivering. I do not really appreciate the cube. Sometimes, the smoke is like dreaming. Other times, well, it just kind of makes you feel sick. I think someday I will transform into a feather, or the moon. Or maybe a thing that swims in a vast body of fluids, fraught with wrathful currents… and storms.