Closer

She looked like she was already gone with white sheets concealing her whole body except for her head which was a mask of Frederick Douglass' hair and Dizzy Gillespie's cheeks

And yet when she opened her one-toothed mouth to let out a shrill sequence of inaudible screams she resembled the cover of “In the Court of the Crimson King”

She wasn't herself

Still in her delirium she recognized my face amidst a patchwork infinity as if I was a black tree in a far-away forest as she fell further and further from Angel Falls as a decomposing mist closer and closer minute by minute approaching the River Permanence