“I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.”

“What is is?’‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true or if it’s a dream.’‘That’s alright. Truth and Dreams are always getting muddled.”

“I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.”

“She points at my chest.“And much more interestingly, what’s that?”“Blood,” I say.She gets her camera out.”

“Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.”

“Well, well,” she murmurs as I back away.She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it.“You’re right,” she says. “The boy’s a living work of art.”

“Words are too easy,” he says. He opens his book. “What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.”