I am born in a bulb and I am the sweat on a stranger's temple, one instant, no crossing.
I strike the little box clamped over her ears and I bloom red, then blue, then that greedy green, all at once because there is no once for me. Fifty heads. Fifty rooftops of hair. Each skull wears a plastic crown that burns a color, and the colors do not agree. Red heads and blue heads and green heads move to different drums I will never hear, cannot hear, sound crawls and I do not crawl, I only land.
I glance off the floorboards, I am the shine on a shoe mid-step, I am the wet gleam of a laughing open mouth. She is dancing to nothing. The whole room is dancing to nothing, or to fifty separate nothings, arms up in a silence that is not silence to them, only to me, who arrives before sound can start.
They tell me these creatures wait. That one of them stood at a door and a cord of them stood behind her and the minutes, they say, minutes, filed past like a slow blue queue. I was not there for it. I cannot be anywhere long enough to wait. A human checks the black glass in her palm, reads a number, sighs, and I do not know what a sigh buys her; I glinted off the glass and I was already her retina, already spent, already the flare she calls seeing.
Green now. Her eyes close. I make it to the back of her, the last soft wall, and there I stop, which for me is also the sun, is also her, is also just now beginning.