the neighborhood to take cover. There are no replies from the ranks; the years have covered them with grass grown wild in memory. His fingers continue their search, sensing movement within, and succeed at his left wrist where a steel pricker stands rigid -- a miniature soldier -- the point of its bayonet piercing the skin for escape. He draws at it with his teeth and feels it give way; with his prisoner pinched between finger and thumb, he crawls with the current toward light. Caught in the death of his squad, leaving only the moon as a guide, he questions his victim, frantic to learn the invasion plans of those left behind to drain his heart. In the blur of morning, he watches his enemy twist once before curling dead in the palm of his hand. Giving him now to the stream, using a leaf as a pallet, he kneels to the dead man's voyage. Drawn by a distant warmth, the Monarch unfolds herself from the silk of her sleep and stumbles the length of a branch before learning to glide to the darkened window of a grey-stoned building silenced for the dying. Unaware of glass, she floats through it and settles on the gentle rise of a wrist where pale tubing weeps within a threadlike vein. Lashes flutter mildly like wings, and the butterfly goes to them, landing softly on the bridge of the nose. She discovers her own image reflected beneath the lid, and passes through the