The wind blows lifting confetti that flew out of third story windows last night while long-lashed boys danced and snorted coke in someone's West Hollywood apartment. The wind blows lifting the sky, pulling dust and smog from the leaves of gratified trees, tossing a young girl's auburn hair.

    The wind comes to our windows and lifts us from sleep; I wake up pasty and cold. It is too early. Isobel is barely awake, her eyeballs keep rolling back in her skull.

    We're still wearing our dancing clothes from last night, strappy dresses and high heels. It's freezing and the moisture in the air makes my hair curl.

    Isobel is making tiny squeaking sounds, her hands wrapped tightly around my arm.

    "I can take you home," I tell her.

    Outside, I unlock my passenger door and Isobel tumbles into the seat. She looks like a flower that hasn't been watered enough. "Where do you live?" I ask. I unlock my door and put the key in the ignition, turning on the heat. It looks like it might rain. "Hey, Isobel, where do you live?"

    "Nowhere," she says. "I don't have a home."

    So I take her to mine.

    Isobel is a childlike empress. She has spider web dreams. Spider wet dreams of glistening dew drop threads wound around pearlized insects dead. Paralyzed, and her long arms and legs creeping over the intricacies, trembling web dropping down shining diamond drops onto fat-lipped flower petals below. Isobel wears leather gloves over her slim pale hands.

    We sit in my room, watching gemstone rain splash and roll on the windowpane, listening to Rasputina and singing along with the chorus lines.

    Isobel's got her hair piled on top of her head so that spirals hang down around her face, a modern Medusa. She's wearing a carnation pink party dress that she had stuffed in her backpack with lots of faux pearl necklaces and bangle bracelets. Fishnets and combat boots. I'm painting her nails glossy pink, neat strokes. "Let's go for a walk," Isobel says, fanning her hands in the air. "In the rain, without umbrellas. I love raindrop kisses on my face. I love the sound of cars swishing through water."

    We run downstairs, skipping steps and nearly colliding with a woman who's going up the stairs, cradling a teacup poodle in her arms. We rush through the swinging glass door and out onto the sidewalk, which is covered by fat brown snails inching happily along. We tip-toe past them, careful of their delicate shells, and once we clear them Isobel tags me, crowing, "You're it!" taking off down the road, heavy raindrops breaking on her as they fall from trees.

    I run after her, my legs spindly, flying almost, I feel as if I can't stop. I could run an entire continent. The little raindrops brush my face like tiny fairy wings, like beautiful sensitive kisses pouring over me. I can see Isobel running beyond me, her boots splashing in the puddles, her bubblegum pink skirt kicking up in a flurry.

    Far off in the distance, the Los Padres mountains penetrate the bloated grey sky in snowcapped peaks, towering hazily over blocks of tract housing and palm trees.

    Isobel keeps looking back at me, laughs dripping from her mouth. I can't quite catch her. I reach out, over and over, almost grabbing her shoulder, the hem of her skirt, but every time she's slick, darting away, saying, "You can't catch me!" Of course, I can't.

    We splashed around and the splashes stuck to our skins, making us jeweled and dragon scaled and ferocious. At lunch Isobel will put bread in the toaster with cheese on top and we will sit by the window laced by rain and roast baby marshmallows on toothpicks in the candle lights that shine on us dry up the waterdrops that we carried inside from the land of puddles.

    Everything is soft like skin when I powder with cornsilk from a glass jar now and soft and soft she is a flower not like at the supermarket all yellow but kiss kiss kiss the sky until her lips are so pale to speak to me and all I want is many boxes and coloured screens which are everycolour beautiful and like her stories she tells me late at night almost frail girls holding bottles of chartreuse in their hands but no she is like the sky or the ocean an eternal thing and she said am I am the last the last the only one forever until forever the end and then she beings to scream like a wailing child covering her ears with her hands no bottles torn wings no whispers to cradle her mouth's fluttering as moths hush hushhushhush it's almost like a dream but bruised and real fragrant and I just want to leave her and go away and be by myself without noise maybe find Aurelia but oh she's just another person.

    Isn't she words flowing like marbles click clack cla clink but I do love her I've come to and I love her that I lost. She's a screamer, too, and after all aren't I also yes oh yes but why do we scream in cars why are we so mad lift our voices to pierce the sky rip it no more kisses or soft it's everything that's hard, industrial because the sound is destructive it cancels everything else out : a flood.

    Isobel is calling me sunshine, sitting next to me in my kitchen the candles burned low. Outside the window the sky is clearing over the large park across the street from my apartment. Officially, it's called Memorial Park, but that's an obfuscation of it's history, and people in the neighborhood call it Cemetery Park, without flinching. Maybe they even laugh a little. About fifty years ago it was filled with headstones and wilting flowers and women dressed to kill in black dresses wringing their hands. Now all the markers are gone and the trees drape their branches over uninterrupted grass. The city demolished the cemetery in the 1960s and left all the bodies unidentified underground. They mingle in the earth. Five above-ground crypts were also removed after the remains had been transferred to a coffin and reburied directly under original site. Some slabs were retrieved by family; others were taken by various city residents who settled them in their gardens among the sweet peas and daffodils, used them for construction and transformed them into abstract art sculptures. Eventually, 500 headstones were tossed with the rubble in the Los Olivas Golf Course levee. Recently, a tombstone weathered by the winter rains and pounding surf washed up on the beach off Surfer's Point. It had belonged to a woman who died young.

    "You're so serious," Isobel says. "Don't chase my stars away."

    "I'll eat the stars in your eyes," I say. "I'll eat the stars in the sky. So they will not decay. So they will not fade and go away."

    "And leave nothing behind?" she asks.

    "I'll leave only what's lost. You should love me like a child," I say.

    "I do!" Isobel says. "I am not a monster."

    "You love me like a spiderweb," I say. "You love me wrap me up. I love you misery. But let's not talk of love. Let's talk of death. I am death for you. That is how I love you."

    "Let's not talk of love," Isobel says. "Let's talk of tea and tropical fish and pearls and needles."

    "Is that all you have to say?" I ask.

    Isobel looks outside, toward the park. "It's all I have," she says. "Anyways, you are not death for me. Death lies in other places than the heart. It lies underground. You might be my murder mystery, but that is not death. For me, you are the things I love. You are teacups and lust and gold desert sand."

    "I am a mermaid from the bottom of the sea," I say. "We will sing songs and drift forever," Isobel says.

    Forever. Forever. Forever.