She lived in the place of nightmares and dreams, the place where the young and the fresh and the old and the withered came to start, or to end. She lived in the place where nothing was solid, nothing was real, and nothing was wrong. There was no law in the place she lived.

Somedays, she’d go walking down the sandy-trashy beach, where tourists and beach bunnies flocked like red and orange sheep, sheep dressed in skimpy bikinis and speedos. The water lapped like a tongue, desperate for these peoples bodies, desperate for their trash, their worries. She’d sit in the sand of this suntanned pasture and watch all the people she’d never know, all the people she would only see once. She would try to grasp the true infiniteness of the people who came there.

Once she’d had her fill of lobster red and crayon orange colors, once she no longer wanted to hear happiness, and smell the salty sea, she’s kick her way though the sand that burned her feet like sparklers, and run away to the forests.

She would go to the places where there was no one, the places where there wasn’t supposed to be anyone, and she would lie down in the moss and the dirt and she would stare up at the knobby rich bark that stretched so high above her head. She would search for the patches of blue that burst out through the green, the sun that would paint golden leopard spots on her skin. She would lie on the ground and she would get up and she would run through the forests like a lioness, a lioness so stranded from the places she wished she could be. A lioness who must make do with the wildness of the forests.

She would become this beautiful lioness and she would run and run and run until her paws turned back into feet and her golden fur turned back into freckles. Then she would retreat back into a lonely human girl, a lonely human girl who knew she was not a powerful, beautiful lioness, but only a child. And this lonely human girl would quietly pad through the forests, and onto the dusty roads, and back to the beaches. Then she would go back to the house between the houses, the house that was nothing special, a house where she was nothing special.

She was not a lioness in this house.

And when the burning summer sun relaxed into the ambers and the reds and the violets and the rainbows, she would climb to the roof of her house, the place where she was not supposed to go. There she would lie, flickering between beauty and beast,and she would cry to the rising silver moon.