If it was true that her latest attempt to reconnect with certain key states of her childhood—in this instance by punching and clawing at the rain-soaked sand pile next to loading dock number seven until her arm was completely encased and her cheek lay soft against the wet surface—had been only a partial success, she had nevertheless managed to fall into a doze that took her not as she had hoped into the room from which all shapes had been banished, but at least into a corral where the horses, whose eyes dripped blood and black mucus, had not yet seen her.