I was a busy woman. I had my computer and a car and a bike, and I was trying to find a computer store to get my computer fixed. I ran into Iyla and invited her back to my house. She said she was busy, but I coaxed her to make time for me because we hadn't seen each other in so long. On the train on the way to my house, I saw my housemate, whose name was Christine. I told her that I had just learned she had been both a police officer and a bounty hunter. She looked ashamed and told me that all of that was public information. I asked her not to be ashamed, that I thought it was wonderful and exciting. I asked her if she could shoot a gun and grinned at her. She said, "Yes, I'll teach you."

When we arrived at the house, I went into the kitchen to make cereal for everyone. There was a very short set of stairs that ended at a narrow walkway by the kitchen counter. I fell down and landed on my belly. I told everyone not to worry because I fell down all the time. I started pouring cereal into the toaster. Christine told me not to get the cereal hot because it wouldn't go well with the milk. So I poured nuts into the toaster, but that didn't seem right either. I didn't know what to do. There were so many different foods to eat, but I didn't have any of the right condiments or utensils for any of them. I thought this was pretty funny, but Iyla and Christine did not.

The three of us went into a different room where a lot of disabled people lived together. I saw a small, green, wooden cabinet behind a door with a bathrobe hanging on it. I knew that a man that was only a head lived in the cabinet, and I was terrified and excited to see him. Christine began to open the door to his cabinet, but I said, "Wait! You have to knock and see if he wants to come out first!" Suddenly he was on the floor to my right. He was a head and a neck, with a square collar of flesh where his shoulders would have been. He inched across the floor like an octupus, crinkling and releasing the edges of the collar to get traction on the carpet. He propelled himself up onto a couch and attached a body to his flesh-collar. It was a tiny, silvery-colored doll's body with legs and pointed black shoes. He crossed the floppy legs and reclined on the couch. Then he changed bodies and put on a metal body, which he said was sturdier but not as fun.

I was a daddy elephant, and I had two elephant children. We jumped off a high bank into a shallow river to take a mud bath. I wallowed in the mud and let my children climb on me and spread mud on my body. The river began to roil with white water. I felt it building up behind my body. Suddenly we were swept down the river. I told my daughter we could stop the river if we could find some hair from a human woman. She held up clumps and strands of hair, but I rejected them one after the other. Finally she held up a single strand--thick, dark, and curly. We continued to float down the river, and I looked over at a road next to us and watched the cars go by. I wondered why humans didn't use the river for traveling since it would do all the work for them and they wouldn't have to build engines.

We came to a stop at a set of white, marble stairs. We climbed out of the river and walked to a desk staffed by a middle-aged, white woman. She looked surprised to see us, but also amused. I had been walking on my hind legs, and I thought the woman might understand me better if I was on all fours, so I slowly tipped forward. As my face came closer to the woman's face, I noticed that she looked alarmed, so I took several steps backward to give her room. I began to explain that we needed to travel back up the river, and I asked her if she would sell us tickets for a boat or a train. She was astonished and told me that animals weren't like humans. I was confused. I began to tell her about all my animal friends and how complicated they were. As I began to speak, my perception changed and I became the woman. As the woman, I saw the elephant I had been. I looked up at his face and saw that he was a very tall, handsome man with a buzz cut. The whites of his eyes were red and he had a shy smile. He was very stoned, and a little apologetic as he told me about his friends. There was Jerry, he said, the walrus with the drinking problem, and another friend who loved cars and fell down a lot. He asked me how I could consider them different from humans when we had all the same problems. I was charmed by his smile. Suddenly I was looking at a newspaper headline: 7 Foot Tall Australian Man Comes to Shore.