The new meds don't give Tyra what she needs: a cure for the condition that brought her to the hospice.

They do give her what she wants.

She beams at the nurse who brings her a breakfast tray. "Thank you, this is perfect."

The nurse raises an eyebrow. Many words could describe the scrambled egg whites with toast and juice on the plastic tray. Soggy, say, or lukewarm and slimy.

But perfect? The poor girl has clearly lost touch with reality. Then again, given what lies in her future, that's probably for the best.

Shaking her head sympathetically, the nurse finally leaves Tyra alone with her breakfast.

Lifting the plastic cover, Tyra takes a rattling breath and pokes the egg scramble with one finger.

She's soaring over the marshes. Below in the humid haze, stegosauruses feed on the ferns by the shore. They're so clumsy, so slow.

Nothing like her kind. Her fellow pterosaurs wheel and cry around her, lifting their crests proudly in the air.

Suddenly one dives into the water and emerges with a silver fish wriggling in its mouth.

Well, she can do better than that. A shadow flickers in the water. In one smooth motion she folds her leathery wings and arrows downward. Proud of her speed, her strength--and the power to fly.

But as she rises, she comes face to face with a massive reptilian head. The toothy jaws yawn open and go BEEP beep beep BEEP.

...wait, what?

The vision fades. One of Tyra's bedside monitors is flashing and beeping. She sighs and sinks back into her pillows, body aching.

Well. That was the best trip yet.

After her first shot of kairosyn, anything she touches sweeps her into a story of its past: whatever she wishes most to see.

She'd eagerly laid hands on everything she could, from bedsheets (the romance of two Indian cotton pickers) to the steel bedframe (the solidarity of striking steelworkers). The problem is that the power only works once per item. Now that she's bedridden, everything is out of reach.

But meals are always new. Today she became the Jurassic ancestor of the chicken that laid her breakfast egg. Now her toast and orange juice shimmer with promise.

Which to choose? Would she become a bride in a Brazilian orange grove with blossoms in her hair? Or maybe she'd bake the first bread in a cave and feed it to her astonished children.

Her hand feels strangely heavy as she reaches for the tray, her elbow knocking the books off her bedside table.

Thoreau's Walden and Whitman's Collected Poems fall to the floor. She's felt too tired to read lately, but she knows her favorite lines by heart.

I am large, I contain multitudes.

And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

When the nurse arrives, Tyra is lying back peacefully with her hand on a slice of toast. Her last vision is unknown, but she is smiling.