and the rain halts after seizing all day, all of last night, where I squandered the two hours left to me in fits, dreaming. View from the windows, the great deep lake and it's surrounding white cliffs. It was night and the shadows were out, and the damp covered the panes in a fine spray that curled the manuscript pages on the sills. And my mother was seeing it for the first time, my home, my study view and white window moldings, and the monolith that slid from the deep and crept to the rocks and dove again and rose again, something like an elephant--a pewter elephant, in fact--climbing the rock face, leaping, diving, surfacing again, enormous. This is what I see, mother, when I sit here. He is always here, the monster in my window. And he wakes me, diving.
