The Windowlessness Propped Open and Other Sneaky Phrases is what she called her book. Me, I had something going on with trolls. The Orange Troll. Troll with Idiophone. His Own Troll. Then it came like a tiny box of paper clips you’d been looking for for ages and finally found: Eating the Troll. We had stalked it past the territories to the edges of the trees, and found the tracks like little scimitar swipes chopping through the ice. The lair was greasy, and smelled of vinegar. He snarled hideously but there was no muscle on him and his claws didn’t penetrate a single hide. We killed him with the large forks; the meat, mostly gristle. His walls were covered with little erotic clippings; women copulating with beasts, women strapped to posts taking it from behind. We gave the hands and feet to the dogs, the head we stuck on a spike and left outside Whitaker’s igloo. We carved the knees into face masks, and brought them to market on Friday, just when you thought you had finished with the troll.

The book on the inside of the other books includes a burning table with assortments of meticulously prepared food, and situations which happened in the sadness of quick streaks, and then there was a book made of strips of sadness itself, and strips of lostness, and remote controllers like cracked coals, or a group of lists nobody wanted, including the writer of the lists, a comedian of errors who opens his pockets and releases a huge span of coins and crusts of bread, pieces of things most birds would ignore.

When she contemplates her crocodile she is thinking about her library, the plants, the forgotten disc left by the postmaster, a pharoah’s ankh, a doily plastered to a car seat, a cold whistling like the most ferocious yodeler in the east, a skunk, a bag made of skunk fur, an attitude posed by the teen who hangs around the corner of 10th and D all day, kicking pebbles into the curb, the way her crocodile stands up in this world, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend striding up all hours of the day, the hairdo that escaped, the drain pipe clogged with broccoli, stems of the pleistocene, highlighters clunking to hardwood, a bee, a bee eating sesame seeds, the juice trickling down the chin, bandits of the Rif, eyes all lit up, toasters, coconuts burning in the toaster, flames in hotels, purges all the time, nodes, smells, call the operator, pack the snowmobile.

A glass of rime sits like a frozen gnome on the operating room floor. Tools lie around in apparent defeat. A hand rifles through a box of children’s bath toys and recoils on contact with a rubber starfish. We are always recoiling from something, it is necessary, at times, to do so. The shallow end has swallowed and digested most of the depths. The remains of the fathoms fork the shore like the husks of something bombed. Shriveled are the remnants of fathoms, wracked forms, wasted with light. A cereal bar thrown in the loam ascends into a tree of bran, its soggy branches releasing stale crumbs to the winds. What is and what is not hangs from innumerable door frames in innumerable towns. From the top of the tree, a boy dressed up as a smoke detector has one vision of a boulder-field capped with a lighthouse and another of a mountain-view blocked by a screen.