II.

     That night she dreamed she was standing by a window, gazing out at a forest so dense and dark she couldn’t see beyond the first row of trees. Then, from out of nowhere, two birds appeared, one iridescent red, the other green, their feathers glinting like jewels. They each had a copper cone tied to their abdomen like a phallus, and they fluttered in the air at eye-level, performing an intricate courtship dance. As she watched them, she started to shiver with the conviction that these birds weren’t imaginary but real, though they didn’t exist in any reality she knew.

     Then she was seated in a glade in the forest at twilight with strangers, all of them holding hands, waiting expectantly for the one who would complete the circle. When a statuesque figure glided out of the woods, a shadow whose features she couldn’t make out, she found herself quivering in anticipation of whatever was to come. The figure sat down opposite her and, after a hesitation, joined hands. There was a moment of stillness…than suddenly she felt her consciousness explode out of her body with a force that sent it flying at light speed along a lateral plane. She became a seemingly infinite expanse of energy, her sense of power so overwhelming that the next instant she contracted in on herself with terror, whirling like a tornado, spinning out of control—as though she’d become chaos itself.

     She woke up abruptly—it was still dark—and saw the objects around her suspended in the air for a moment before resuming their usual grounded orientation. When she glanced over at the bed next to her, with a desperate hope that she wasn’t alone—that Alana’s roommates had arrived in the night—sure enough, the neighboring bed bulked with a comforting presence. Relieved, she fell back to sleep and didn’t wake up until dawn. But this time when she noticed the adjacent bed, she saw the covers were tightly bound and knew with certainty that it had never been slept in.

     In the days that followed, she wondered why she had never run into Alana and Aaron together before because now she saw them everywhere. They rarely touched in public but walked and sat so close together, concentrating so fixedly one another, they couldn’t have seemed more passionately entwined if they’d been entangled in each other’s arms. To watch them seemed prurient, she thought—like peeping—their love was so exposed. And the feeling that took root in her and burgeoned was a scalding jealousy