When Fly stopped sleeping for a time, she decided to walk around the earth searching for flowers, collecting them and putting them all in the one place so she could sleep knowing they were safe. She would cover the bare ground with flowers - a bed so big, it would be impossible to not fall into a deep reverie.  Determined to see the darkness behind her lids, she took off her shoes and burnt them. Did you ever see Fly in those days, walking the earth barefoot?

She took no specific route, had no map, only let the flowers call out to her. She would collect roses, peonies, daisies, irises, lilies, lotus - all asking for her to rescue them from their imprisonment, the dying soil. When she got sick of flowers, she would turn to books, pick them, read from page to page, until she reached the end. Then of course she would burn them, inhaling their ashes and spreading them across fields where flowers no longer lived, watching as new books grew from the earth, replacing all the flowers, pages blossoming like petals. She felt nothing just like the earth beneath her feet which was already starting to decompose. She would rescue the flowers before the earth swallowed them too, the way it had swallowed Stevie.

She kept the flowers together in a large bag made from her torn dresses, cut her long braid and made a handle out of it. Whenever she camped out on the beach, her journey was interrupted by small tsunamis of ginger ale. She would open her mouth and drink it in, inhaling their bubbles. Even when she had picked all the flowers and placed them on an open field, she could only lay there, haunted by the darkness, staring into the nothingness, knowing she would never sleep again.