I leave the sun and I am the exhibition hall, all at once, no crossing between. A wall of window at the entrance, and then me, everywhere: the sequined haunch of a nine-foot wolf, the wet plastic gleam of a fox's grin, the felt tips of a hundred ears catching me and throwing me back changed.
I do not travel to the fur. I begin at the fur. The star made me and the emerald flank of a dragon received me and these are the same wink.
They say I flashed off ten thousand rhinestones sewn by hand over many nights. I was not there for the nights. I only know the rhinestone, blazing, exact, one point of me split into a spray of colors across a laughing muzzle.
The warm creatures do a thing I cannot: they hold still in a long line at a doorway. Bright plush shoulder against bright plush shoulder, checking small glowing rectangles, tilting the fake snouts up to read a clock. A clock. They are measuring the one substance I have never touched.
They stand in the queue as if the queue were somewhere to be, and not just the gap before the good part. I have no gap. I have never once been on my way.
One of them lifts a wolf head off, and underneath is a human face, flushed, grinning, sweating, eyes shining wet, and I land in that shine and this is where I stop. Ninety-three million miles and no distance at all, the fusion in a star and the tear at the corner of a delighted eye, one event. I arrive in the eye that waited hours to see the others.
I do not know what waiting cost them.
I only know I was worth it, instantly, forever, now.