“It’s a dream,” she says. Her throat is dry, her breath puffing in rasps over an arid tongue and cracked lips.

Rubbing her face vigorously, Rose breathes deeply several times, then opens her eyes again. Still autumn. Still an ancient junkie. Still in an alien land. She slaps herself, hard: cheeks, shoulders, thighs. At the same time she yells as loud as she can: “Aaaahhhhhhhh!”

Nothing changes, except now her cheeks sting and her throat is filled with razor blades and sawdust. Thirst has become more demanding than the pain in her arm, the sickening spin of leaves more demanding than fear.

This is a dream.

Rose knows this. People don’t wake up on the wrong side of the rabbit hole. She rolls to her hands and knees. Slowly, achingly, her dream-body convinced it is that of an emaciated centenarian, she readies to stand. Arms around the tree, she pulls herself to her feet. The bark is smooth. A breeze blows cool on her bare buttocks.

Awfully specific for a dream, she thinks. This thought injects another dose of terror into her brain. She lets it pass. It leaves a trail of broken glass in her psyche. Rose has had many dreams where she knows she is dreaming. So many, she has devised a surefire test. When Rose is dreaming, she can fly. Letting go of the tree, she raises skeletal mottled arms to the sky.

Rose cannot fly.

She’s back on her knees, sticks and leaves pricking her bare legs.

Asleep, awake, in her meditation room, or in the Land of Nod, she has to have water. Never before has she been truly thirsty. This is it. Water becomes the only thing that matters. After she drinks, she will figure out what is happening.

In the ring of flaming leaves surrounding her, there is a break, a dark triangle big enough for a child—or a shriveled old woman—to crawl through.

Rose crawls through it.

On the other side is a long narrow meadow. Sun touches the grasses. They sparkle with their offerings of dew. Cars honk in the distance. Traffic hums faintly. Beyond the trees, across the cleared area, she sees roofs tucked into the riot of fall color. Rose has never been here before.

No past, no future, the present a mystery, she is groundless, a spark of life in a chunk of meat, part of the duff and twigs. This is the eternal moment of Now. Somehow, she’d imagined it would be more enlightening, less creepy.

Laughter, gay and careless, percolates through the gap in the foliage screening her from the meadow.

Holding to fistfuls of the supple branches, she totters out of her meditation lair. She pulls herself to her feet, stands swaying and blinking in the morning sun. Two boys, perhaps twelve or thirteen, both wearing small backpacks, are walking bicycles down the green. They don’t notice an ancient skeleton in a hospital gown wobbling in the shrubs.