38. That's the number my mind has chosen to abstract itself while I try to ignore the discordant barks that underlie in the deepest depths of my last great negative thought, that seven-tailed whip lash with rusted splinters whose ferric decay remains latent, anchored to my cervical spine, often reproducing automatically with any sudden thermal jolt. And the digit returns to strut before my brow, staining its horizon garnet under my lunatic gaze, and I dissolve it into a monochromatic, phantasmagoric kaleidoscope, lacking perspective, wickedly obsolete, uselessly scandalous, a dispensable ingredient in any goulash of effigies arising in occipital forests with shoulders stained garnet on their horizon. The scrawny, haughty prudishne...