Start to think of progress in terms of not having made any. It has been five years and the hero's tongue is still lost under the wallpaper. He doesn't look for it anymore. He sits there and drinks vegetable juices through a straw, apparently satisfied that it's somewhere in the room. Every year the earth gets smaller, two or three inches at the equator, but at the same time slightly heavier. It is the aliens that sneak into the world as birthday candles that refuse to go out; that extra light accounting for the additional weight. Things become odd without becoming complicated Mythologies are invented to lit the elders be elders while they're still young than lapse into obscurity. The senses sway like a house trailer crowded with hungry parrots.