After she'd gone out with people to a club! A real live club! With her cupcake-now-crop! and moved-danced-enjoyed she'd been dreaming. Only. She isn't sure they're dream-dreams and not just memories remembered when the night is dark and full and she has no where else to go but to worry or sleep.

And sometimes she can't help but sleep. She can't not sleep. She tried. It's not pretty. Or. No, it makes everything less pretty and she's not at all, so no sleep plus her is less the pretty it's a pile of garbage stewing in hotdog water.

So sleep. Except.

It's black as ink, as soot, as stains, there is a rhythm, a repetition, a thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk, but sometimes it speeds up until it strings together and runs over itself and can't contain itself - !

- then, sometimes. Only ever sometimes. A silence-focus-stillness-precision. But the not sound breaks. Shattering, sinking. Sliding until it's thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk - and a frenzy of steps, more of a dance then a movement, that everyone knows the steps to, but no one could ever tell you exactly how and why. On one and two then paws of four and three, -they-she-they die and live and breathe Ruin. Going down and deep. and around. Always, always around.

She wakes up, choking on nothing, and gasping, greedily at air that smells as sweet at her beside a dumpster back alley home, and sweating, clothes clinging and tight and she can't fight back like this - !

- thinking she should be dizzy, should feel bile bubbling up and acid burning her throat.

But she doesn't.