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You may remember my good friend, the hapless fleece. When he wakes up in the dusty morning, or in the thin crevices of night, he looks at his hand; he looks at his hand and sometimes thinks that it is the hand of a corpse. Has a dead mannlich jerked himself from beneath his grave to rest beside my good friend, the hapless fleece? This is sign that we are not doing well, that certain ways of sleep have led us, like the sneering face of a procuress in the wash of orange lamps, to dens filled with moss green pillows of disease, where hangs a terror with no ancestry.
Ô, but the hapless fleece! How his peculiar and swelling heart must sweat panic!
He looks at the dead hand; it lies peacefully on the pillow next to his head. He examines with the delicacy of a ribboned girl, the great blue vein in the center of the hand; the vein that is in his hand and all hands above the earth, thick and bloated, squirming quietly. The vein is deflated like the unknown remains of something lying in a puddle. It lies peacefully on the pillow next to his head and the hapless fleece finds himself returning to days when he stared at a river from betwixt the rusting green beams of the bridge looking over it, with his eyes melting onto his cheeks, with his hands dully purple.
Pull your covers over your eyes, Ô miserable one, never return home!

He stares at the little bones of the dead hand, the little bones like translucent threads of silk, with their silent geography, and finds himself cast back to days when he spread his body on the sharp grass and coughed bright green stars of snot, and leaked grey drooling vomit onto the ground, while red ants crawled from their tunnels, over his hands, and the savage whisper of mosquitos hung in the air. Wrap yourself tighter, Ô bored one, the air in Florida sags like wet bread and will stifle your coughs! The dead hand does not stir; it sleeps and sleeps with complacent smiles, and the hapless fleece looks at the tight ashen surface of skin that wraps the hand as a spider wraps a fly, examining the tiny ravines splitting across the skin and at the hairs that jutted from them to hang languidly;

the skin of the dead hand like something that would change colors, would begin to ooze cruel odors and be draped slovenly across the surface of wherever it came to lay like greasy strands of hair;

the skin of the hand that would change colors, begin to ooze cruel odors and be draped slovenly across the surface of wherever it came to lay like strands of greasy hair and the hapless fleece will begin to wonder whose hand it must be:

shut it up under the pillow and do not look at it anymore.

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