At first I think I've been taken to a mountain. A tall gray mound stands out from the wide expanse of sand, and its edges slice through the landscape. It's not as jagged as the mountain I'm used to, though. At closer inspection it almost appears to be a small and densely grown forest, where the grey trees grew so close together there was no longer any space between them. But if that is so, where are the branches? The leaves? The sinewy scales of their exterior? All I see is a grey flatness rising above the bright surface.

The woman stops the beast within a few paces of this peculiar mountain and jumps to the ground. She approaches the grey outer layer and makes the noise, "aperta."

The mountain shrieks, creating a sound that has never once befallen my ears. A sliver of blackness is created in the greyness, and both sides of the darkness pull farther away from one another until a wide hole has been dug from the mountain.

The female enters into this abyss, and I am forced to follow.

"Lux," I hear, and it sounds like the woman again. The blackness which had consumed me recedes to a low, mid-afternoon glow, and I look around me, but fail to understand. This is entirely unlike anything I have ever experienced. There are a myriad objects I do not comprehend and each glimmers with every touch of the light. I feel the mountain falling in on me as I turn my eyes in every direction and still see more, more and more. There is a burst of anxiety as I feel a rush of pain flooding into my head. I run back to the sand, hoping to ride away on the beast.

When I return, the great animal is already gone, stumbling around to where another hole has formed in the rock. It meanders into the opening, and I can see a collection of similar creatures grazing inside the mountain.

I wander over to this place, the pain moving away from me. I see two small rivers formed along the far sides and two riverbeds running up the middle. The earthen, waterless riverbeds are filled with dried, yellow grasses, and the animals seem contented to dip their noses into this abundant source of food. Famished, I choose to dip into this delicious bounty.

The grass is not as dry as its colour appears, but it far from the tall, sopping, purple flora of the old riverbed. It has a nutritious taste to it, though, and I continue eating as much as I can shove into my mouth. I have no interest in the woman's fired meats, which she will no doubt force on me whenever she first gets an opportunity.

As if she can sense the images in my head, the woman enters this haven from deeper within the mountain.

Her fur has dramatically changed in colour. Her legs are covered in a thick blue whereas her middle and arms are a thin red. Her head is now engulfed by much smaller locks of brown hair, the colour of a sunset dipping below a late summer forest, which no longer conceals her face. She is carrying more grass in a rotund, grey object, and she dumps it into a barer portion of the riverbed.

The female then stands close to one of the creatures, placing her right hand on its nose and her left on its farthest cheek before burying her face into the neck of the great beast. I notice little reaction in the animal, but I can see the woman's rugged face begin to soften, and her eyes close gently shut. Her new fur reveals more precisely the curves of her chest, and I notice the time between her breaths become greater and greater.

I put my hand on the nose of another animal, and it reacts wildly, racing towards the farthest reaches of the place. The other animals reach up their heads from drinking and eating and I can feel their eyes all watching me.

The female leaves her beast and quickly moves over to me. She jumps over the riverbed of grass and walks to the disturbed beast, patting its body, always looking at its sides and not its face. Soon, the beast is quiet and settled, and it returns to consuming its grasses. I keep my hands at my sides.

The woman's breathing is still even and deep, but her face no longer holds that softer quality. The skin has visibly tightened, and my stomach begins to constrict as well. I know that running will do little good, so I stand in one place and stare up at the sky, now suddenly brown and uneven, hoping that whatever is about to be done will be done quickly.

She removes a grey stick from her blue fur near the hip, grasps my slightly trembling hand and plunges it into my skin. Within moments I am shaking on the ground, giant globules of spit spouting from my sputtering mouth. Every muscle in my body is simultaneously tensing and relaxing, making me seize and spasm without any hope of control. For a long stretch of time, my vision becomes completely red as I feel my brain being struck by lightning and lit on fire.

Finally, my vision clears and I see quite clearly. The woman holds my hands and redistributes my weight as I hoist myself up to my feet.

She moves to leave, but before she does, she has me know that I am to refer to her as Great Water in my mind. I don't know how she does this, but I will know soon. Great Water makes sure I understand this.

I am to sleep here for the night, and Great Water will return in the morning.

∞

She is not water. She is a woman. Yet, she is also Great Water. I will understand soon enough, though I do not right now.

We sit in the dried grasses and stare at each other. That is all we've done for days, but that is not all we've done. Or is it?

Her fur is changed again to simpler brown that is the same for both parts of her body. It is simpler that way. Too many colours, especially ones that I've never seen before will cause me great pain.

She stabs me with the grey stick again. I seize, but my reactions are slowly becoming less violent. Eventually, they will end entirely. The seizures are good for me though. I need the diseased pieces of my brain to die so that the better sections can regrow. This will make me smarter. It is also returning feeling to my wrist. I might be able to use both hands soon enough.

The shiny stick attaches us, Great Water and I. Someday, I will be able to differentiate between her mind and my own, but for now I cannot. For now, I must choose to accept these pictures in my mind ("thoughts", does she refer them as "thoughts"?) and try to use them.

This place in which I have been sleeping is a "stable". It is for the "horses". Well not really horses, they're just like horses, but that's just semantics anyways. The horses of my childhood weren't nearly as massive, and they didn't have natural immunity to petroleum. I'm still not sure how they accomplish it, but I think it might have something to do with the epidermis developing these plant-like cell walls which don't allow the oil to break the cell's membrane...

I'm sorry. It's been so long since I did this. I need to stay in the stable with the horses. The water and the grasses are similar to the valley. There are other things in this place of Great Water; however. Many wondrous things which I cannot yet comprehend. Later, she will bring these items into the stable one by one, and we will have thoughts about them. I will know how to use and refer to them. I will know how to be human again.

I don't know what a human is. It's not important. Anyway, I'm not really a human, either, I guess. Again, it's not important. I'll start to understand what I mean later.

Today, there is no object. There is only "learning". That is I will be doing. Once I know what I am doing, I will be able to do it: to learn. Tomorrow, Great Water will bring me an item and I will learn it. No, I will learn about it. This day, however, I need to learn to learn.

I am confused, but greatly intrigued.

∞

When I refer to something in my mind, I use that thing's "name". Great Water's name is not Great Water, but it is the one that is easiest for me to use right now.

Great Water holds up an object. First, I recognize that its edges are straight. I recall drawing shapes in the stable ground with my index finger and realize this object is similar to a triangle. It is also metallic and shining, like the injector used to for my morning inoculations. This means that it is unnatural, or that I would not find it in the valley.

I must touch it, but carefully. I run the pointer finger of my right hand across the edge and it comes smeared with blood. Then the appendage begins to sting, and I instantly plunge it into my mouth, both to stop the bleeding and in hopes of ending the pain. It does neither.

Great Water takes my hand, holds a rock to my gushing finger and makes the sound, "sana".

The wound is quickly closed and the pain fades from into memory. The memory is what is most important, though. Other places, besides the stable, have many straight metal edges like this one. They are sharp, and they all can cut. Great Water knows and has still cut herself many times through all the time she's been here. How long is that? Too long for me to comprehend. Longer than the rainy season? Yes, longer than all the rainy seasons put together.

Is that how Great Water made her scars? Did she cut herself on the sharp edges? Yes, some of them. Others were from burns, from fires. Great Water went into a forest on fire? There are other ways to find fires, but yes, once. I've been forced to do many things. Things that I don't care to remember.

I like to remember when I had so much food, I felt my belly had a whole new person inside of it like a woman's. That is a lesson for another day. What is? It doesn't matter, and that memory isn't a memory, anyways. It's a dream. Dream? It never happened to me. I was always hungry. I was always starving; I just wanted so much food that I felt my belly might explode.

Explode is not important right now. I will learn that later.

It is not a happy name. I have a thought of fire and women screaming. It is not a happy name at all.

∞

The longer I stay in the stable, the more unpredictable Great Water's behaviour has become. There are days when she does not bring an object for my daily lesson. At first, she would just have me learn something "abstract", but later she would enter the stable, see that she wasn't carrying anything, leave and then come back with a new object.

On other days, she calmly strides in with items like the "pillow" and "blankets" on which I now sleep. On another she enters with a "bucket" and we gather water from a "cistern" for use of the horses. Yesterday, she brought a "box", and I learned the "inside" and "outside" of it. The days when she appears with nothing are random I gain little by the experience. I don't know the name of this behaviour, and I'm afraid to discover it.

There have even been a few occasions when she never entered the stable at all. The first time she did this, I sat crouched in the straw for an entire day, waiting. When night came, I still refused to move, wondering if the lesson was somehow connected to the darkness. Perhaps we were going outside to study the stars. I thought of the beautiful sparking patterns in the sky for some time, letting my body float along a stream of images that now fill my head in vibrant detail. With each lesson I am able to stay longer in my mind, create more vivacious colours and explore further reaches of space before my head begins to cloud over and the old pain returns.

That night, I pushed myself too far, swirling over the great river of my valley like a bird in flight and just as I was about to land and survey the people there, I felt a trickle of blood on my neck. I opened my eyes, and touched the pooling liquid, finding its source at my ear. I wasn't in any pain, just lightly dazed. Perhaps that is why I missed the sounds at first.

As I was forced back into total consciousness, I heard a half-complete screech in the distance, beyond the stable, further "inside" the mountain. There could be little doubt it was Great Water, but there was something different about her sounds. They were wispy and disembodied. They travelled too. I focussed my hearing and could make out a soft shuffling that moved in and out of my ears' range.

All this time, Great Water would expel short tendrils of breath in the sound of "darcy...darcy...darcy".

The shuffling footsteps came closer to the door of the stable, and for a moment I saw an enormous man, far larger than any I had ever witnessed, with spotted fur and yellow hair and two metallic circles outlining his eyes. He walked silently across the stable, his tremendous feet falling silently unto the straw floor. Then, as Great Water's sounds travelled again, he disappeared in mid-step towards me.

One of the first lessons was about "real" and "false". What I saw when my eyes were open was real. What I saw when they were closed was false. But I saw the yellow-haired man when my eyes were open. He was there, and then he was gone. Was he real or was he false?

What if I did not know if my eyes were opened or closed? There are times when I think my eyes are opened, when I'm learning from Great Water, and I see things that are not real.

The horse in the grassland was not real. The endless rows of straight, metal mountains were not real. The mound of corpses packed into a poorly dug square earthen hole was not real. I was made to know that.

But I know nothing of the yellow-haired man. I know nothing of the shuffling feet, of the days without Great Water or the times without objects. Are these real? Are they false? Are my eyes ever open?

I tried not to sleep the next night as well. There were no sounds. There was no yellow-haired man.

∞

Great Water tosses a heap of coloured furs at me.

They are "clothes", not furs, and I need to get "dressed" before I go inside.

I am leaving the stable?

Yes, I will be leaving as soon as I learn to put on the clothes.

This task requires the better part of the day. First I learn the names of each component of the clothes. There general names such as the "cloth", "fabric" and "denim" of which they are made. Then there is the specific "shirt" which will cover my chest and its "sleeves" for my arms; "underwear" which will cover my crotch and "pants" which will cover my legs. There are "buttons" and "zippers" which keep the clothing from falling apart, and I have to learn how use each instrument without breaking them (which takes me several attempts).

Finally, after I've already ruined nearly a dozen pieces of clothing, I must try to put them on. Placing my feet through the holes in the underwear requires a coordination with which I'm not entirely comfortable. I accidentally step on the first one, and tear its overly fragile cloth. On the second attempt I manage to put one leg successfully through a hole, but I rip it when trying to pull it over to my next leg.

Great Water averts her eyes and tends to horses. This is something I must learn to do on my own. She has no interest in dressing me every day.

On the third try the underwear is firmly fastened, and I feel nothing but a terrifying impulse to scratch my entire itching body. Simply putting on the tiny piece of cloth has made my skin feel like it is being scoured by a haze of furious ants.

Great Water knows it will be uncomfortable for me, but I will come to accept the utility of these clothes.

Shaking with every effort I make, the stable suddenly seeming extremely cold, I move to the mound of denim pants. Applying these requires a similar approach as the one given to the underwear, but even though I can put both my legs into these fairly easily, I trip and fall when I try to pull them up to my thighs. Thankfully, the denim seems better able to stretch than the cloth, and it doesn't rip under my blundersome treatment of it. After accepting that it will be impossible to put the pants on while standing up, I lay on the straw, place my feet into their required holes and pull the clothing up to my waist.

It is only after I have stood in stark triumph that I realize that the zipper is not at my front where it is supposed to be. I growl, fall to the ground and repeat the process again.

The shirt is a much easier affair. I still tear one apart when I try to put my arm into the second sleeve, but after the first two clothing items, this is more or less to be expected. I am able to put the second shirt over my arms and shoulders without shredding the fabric. The buttons are a particular challenge, however, and my hopelessly slight fingers cannot seem to fit them through the buttonholes. It was much easier earlier in the day when Great Water demonstrated and helped me while I was still crouching on the ground. Now, upright, with my chin pressed painfully into my collarbone, my tongue sticking out in concentration, it seems impossible just to hold the button with one hand and the shirt with the other.

Frustrated, I awkwardly rip the buttonhole larger and I quickly shove the buttons into their places. My shirt hangs loosely on my chest, much less form-fitting than the shirt of Great Water, but I hope this will meet the specifications for now. I am eager to enter the inside.

However, when I look to see where Great Water is, I notice she has wandered off. I scan the stable, but all there is are horses staring blankly back at me. Disappointed, I settle back into the straw and hope that I will be shown the inside tomorrow, with my new set of clothes.