Around a goldfish pond, unwashed kids tormenting love bugs, lips powder-yellow with pollen, slathered in Bahiagrass seed. The bed of an umber Ford rusts through and green is bursting bright.

Across the gray glass stain of the sky, water droplets collect and run as if chased by the wind.  They merge into rivulets.  I reach out, I strain for them with my hair, and (now we’re getting somewhere) I feel the waters of the sky run up individual strands of hair to my scalp and into the veins in my temple, into the sea, and (breathe) I open myself and start to think in a language not my own.

As the game began, the black-suited and infrared-enabled foreign agents convened deep in the dank catacombs beneath the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Opening a titanium case, they released their living weapons, a squad of four remotely mind-controlled squirrels, developed by and purchased from a Russian psychobiology team in Saransk, Mordovia. These agile drones were armed with diamond-plated teeth and nanotech ocular scanners, allowing their controllers to see through the mutat