There’s a man reading Blood Meridian while knitting a consistent pearl stitch that would have my grandmother’s envy. He’s got hypnotic fingers, crazy magician’s hands with long digits and a broad palm. Air hands in palmistry. The man works either oblivious to my attention or uninterested in it, and I don’t care so long as he doesn’t pause his looping green weaving. In a second the trance of watching his hands takes me back to my last encounter with a raccoon. She stood on her haunches with her paws in the air, her inflated biped self blocking me from harming her brood of two slow-moving kits waddling their way across the street behind her. I turned my bicycle away from her and took the long way home out of respect for mothers everywhere, and resolved to remember how she lowered her paws when I surrendered without a fight, and how it felt like thanks. As I pedaled away I thought her children would struggle enough, between cars and sealed garbage cans and dogs and traps set in gardens with peanut butter tricks, and men coming in work boots to take their caged bodies some place unfamiliar and lonely. No: they didn’t need to worry about me. Back in the present the man’s progressing scarf or hat or something else drowns me deeper into my own head as I recall a time when my eyes were ringed red. I was finishing my master’s thesis, and I don’t remember eating at all as I rearranged words in sleepy sentences and adjusted margins and running headers and footers and purchased 20 pound paper with a watermark. I wore out my printer, all the while wearing my sleep deprivation mask that mirrored the raccoon’s face, that called her essence into my body. Everything I wrote then was waking dream to make up for what night didn’t have; it was sitting prisoner in a chair made of seven-fingered hands that activated when my eyes got heavy; it was spying trolls crouched in corners with hammers for hands, waiting for the right moment to swallow my cats. Now: I shake my head awake and swallow a mouthful of cold coffee polluted by stray grounds, and the magician-man turns a page and unwinds another ring from the rapidly fading ball of green. Today, this weaver unravels me in an instant.