'Why don't you sit down and watch this,' he's saying. I glance at the screen and shake my head. I don't want to watch a Komodo dragon take down a water buffalo. It's the problem of having children late in life. Your last son is 15; you're four times that and the resilience is just gone. The metaphors are just too much. Not every day, but today. How to explain. The bite on the heel, the unfairness of that alone, that metaphor alone, and then the poison working through, a kind of insemination, a poison to bloom. I suppose, and then the buffalo limping off, grazing on and on, for a week or more, and all the while Komo-dra is tracking, waiting, for the return on investment, a Komodo derivative, a reptilian asset swap, without any conscience, wouldn't that be a vacation? — to be in such a mindless state — and then when Buffalo Death starts dancing in the nostrils, half a dozen more dragons appear, tongues flopping like spent dicks, moving closer with the assurance of continents. And so I go back down into the garden, to look still again at the hanging baskets and the squash and the struggling lavender. It's a pitch-blue sky, not enough breeze for a kite made of random thoughts. You could rummage through an attic full of beautiful days in the last five years and you couldn't find a match for this one. And yet that thought of the dragons coming around, slitering after your heels, waiting on the rocks, and you have no idea, you're just another animal in the kingdom.