We get lost in a web of stories built tangentially off of each other until the origin, the spark of initial awareness, is gone: a math equation with missing parenthesis and brackets of closure. Seven seems to be the number repeating itself today, partially because I left "Seven" on repeat while I was baking cupcakes in the kitchen. It all seems to fit--creating new tines in the fork--from my story, to that of a seven year old imagining mermaids in the clouds, to my earlier thoughts of my cousin's seven year old daughter trying to process the death of her father in the heat of the Ohio summer. Something is feeding on my memory, causing me to scribble out strange Rules & Obstructions from the place where my brain cannot separate the senses.

Synesthetics began the evening by tasting the muddled murmurs of the funerary feast; their stiffly pressed pant legs of coarse cotton clung to bruised kneecaps while rumpled handkerchiefs hung limply with discarded grief.