about the unhinging of her own mind, the Moon.

In 1937, in a beautiful little house in the South of France, a small titmouse resided with a brutish beast. In the crooks and crannies of the idyllic cottage, insulated by their own dreams, they played together, for two surreal years. The titmouse was younger than the beast but this didn't matter, for, cosmically, she was as old as the Universe and he was just a child, even though his bones creaked like an old man. The titmouse instilled in the beast the memories of a youth he had forgotten entirely. She drew things he had only fathomed but could never before bring to life. They spoke the same language, outside of human vernacular, of course. They played together like children in the sandbox. Sometimes he would find his own fur in a plate of scrambled eggs, a dish which the titmouse had cheekily prepared as she hopped around the kitchen. Other times, the beast would scare the titmouse half to death, at the most inopportune of times, while she was drawing cards from a deck, or stretching her pretty blue feathers, or disentangling a gold necklace from a set of black fishnets. The titmouse pecked at the beast's fur, jumping all over his body as he rested, snatching a thread here, a thread there, while the beast let out dream filled growls, which sometimes sounded like laughter. She would then take the strands back to her nest, and place them, ever so carefully, in just the right way, so as to form the most magical nest, in which grew the most magical creatures, diagrams, elements, dreams- incarnations that could be seen only as something resembling that which one observes with human eyes to be real but is not entirely real at all. Of course, the strands were just adornments; the strands never comprised the real engineering of the nest. They would play games together, often hiding, often stowing their animal bodies beneath the floorboards, or just over the eaves of the woven roofed cottage, or behind the drapes which were dark and eerie in the ancient dust of the moonset. In the woods just surrounding them, there was always the danger of feeling the reality of the outside world. The threat of fascism, imprisonment, suffering, were always there, but you would have never known it by the flirtatious and cheeky interplay of the titmouse and the beast. Nonetheless, this is perhaps why they were always playing this game of hiding, unconsciously preparing for a world growing ever dimmer; the darkness surrounded the lit orb around the flame of a dying candle, as they painted through the night, constantly conjuring trickery between the Lovers. After two years hunters finally came and dragged the beast away. In a fury, clawing at the flesh of the pigs, the beast went down, disappearing into the wild unknown. The titmouse, finding herself alone in the empty little house, started to bleed from her breast, whistling a ghostly tune, as she mourned the beast. She didn't know if he would ever come back, and she wandered the empty hallways, muttering in French about the Hanged Man, about whether she should sell the house, about the unhinging of her own mind, the Moon.