An alphabet demands little in the way of obedience. It treats us as if we have always been present and will always remain present, like light or what people call fear when they are searching desperately for some word to explain why they behaved the way they did. Tweaking the consonants more often than not results in a strange humming sound and then, unfortunately, we are back where we started, hoping for something enormous to jump out at us, to serve as a temporary decoy while the real culprits escape through a side exit. Eulalie has been patient, but that patience, you can tell, is beginning to evaporate, to ascend to the heavens where it will be broken up into parts and re-shuffled, distributed again on the breeze like microscopic bits of pollen. She knows the late nights are not spent among the gentry, the flute solos not meted out with anything resembling caution. Her back is turned, the forest in the background seems to swell to twice or even three times its normal size, and I know instinctively this is not an illusion. Eulalie is in charge of everything we see; she controls it somehow with her mind, the same way we do, and if you were identify the mechanism that allows it, what good would it possibly do you? How would you explain it again to others without feeling completely inadequate to the task like the child suddenly thrust before an audience and expected to play something he has not practiced on the piano? I stitch the requisite words together using something like thread, only I find, after much pulling at it with my fingers, it doesn’t have any real substance. It is generated out of itself, ex nihilo, and should you try to isolate it so as to be able to repeat this procedure, you would be left with little more than an eye that won’t stop twitching or a memory of a time when you were trying to say one thing and you ended up saying another. God knows, there are plenty of those. When pressed, Eulalie repeats her belief that jealousy is the thing that makes the sun come up in the morning. But by this, of course, she means that which, should you step off the side of a cliff or a balcony, will send you plummeting to earth where you will find, at best, all your bones have been broken. She is not happy at being pressed, and makes her feelings known. She does this, as near as I can tell, by disappearing altogether for weeks at a time, wandering off into the darkness of the forest and the canyons scattered about throughout the forest like discarded bus frames (only longer) -- all while managing somehow at the same time to stay seated on the couch beside you in the evenings, to brush her teeth methodically at the master bathroom sink.