I’m so busy dreaming of teaming up with my parallel-universe self for evil purposes that I don’t notice he’s backed over the baby evergreen poking crookedly out of the earth. The Charlie Brown tree. Jason. He plows forward over Jason and backs up again. Weakling branches snap and crunch. It’s twenty-two degrees and I’m standing in the yard in a tank top and an old pair of Nicholas’s boxers that I laid claim to long ago. Yesterday’s mascara clumps in my eyelashes and my cheek is wearing the pattern of my wristwatch. We belong on Jerry Springer. I inhale half the oxygen in Morris and bellow:
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