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Bob thought for a moment. The power flowed past him, around him, not quite piercing his aura, but ruffling it still. It's time. He raised his arms. He heaved his aura up, out, around and hollowed. Ziiiinnnnnggggg. His aura swung up and out like a giant solar prominence. The power echoed and molded and coursed around and through him. He guided forward, outward, onward. He had to be cautious, it was a gargantuan flow; his hands outstretched and the star-guidance of his future beguiling his simplicity. Still, courtesy must be followed. Still carefulness, gentleness, fidelity despite the rough handling to separate the wheat from the chaff. Bob lifted higher, turning, whirling.

The walls collapsed into his opening memories. A Bavarian restaurant, Ratskeller, Oompahpah. Neon exterior and painted murals inside. Knockwurst and sauerkraut. Oompahpah. He shunted power over and around, wrestled it high. The twin vortices of male and female pulled apart. He aimed toward the distant mega-sink. Sovereigns from another galaxy attempted to intercept, but his protective distractive field split and recombined the stream safely. A paladin intervened: a sheath and guide flare led the way.

Bob tunneled the purple power through the sheath, a tenth-of-a-second power burst. Clear. Dropbox stars and plaudits drifted downward. Bob put them away for safekeeping, future distributions.

The drizzle of the rain outside humbly brought him back to his physical reality. It trickled down the rooftop, off the eaves, and in large drops plopped into a narrow dirt line it had cut into the grass edging the house. Bob rose from the rocking chair, walked to the window, rested his elbows on the sill and gazed outside. The window steamed from his breath up close. He put his full weight on his elbows and stretched his back.

The stereo headphone rock-and-roll and the psychic clearing stimulated him, changed his perspective, cleared his head. He walked over to his desk and sat down at the blank computer screen, icons and menus, the screen eager to be filled with words for future readers. Bob stared down at the keyboard; nothing came to him: writer's block. He knew he had to write something - a muse tugged at his soul to design, to be creative. He just couldn't find a path, a direction. He began to just put down words. Free write. Debra Debra Debra Debra Debra. He liked the way the D and b looked together, like her body lying on top of his. His muse caught his memories and imagination drifting into reverie. Stop. Write more.

Lemons. He would write about lemons. Lemons on beaches on a red-sky day. Cascading and sheeting, dropping from the sky to the beach all around him. A red streaked fluorescent orange sky, hot from the sun, streaked with vapor trails and clouds and white puffy clouds Debra Debra Debra Debra Debra. Bob Thompson. Bob Thompson. Bob Thompson. He tried several variants of his signature. Loopy B. Fancy T. P with a flourish underneath.

Debra. Debra and Bob had nuzzled around - they spent a couple hours late after class one night, Bob flat on a wooden bench, Debra on top of him. Although homespun and rather plain, with a small-town look, Debra had a great body. Plain slacks and plaid blouses. I wonder, he thought, if a woman imagines herself with the last name of her boyfriend. Debra Thompson. Am I to be his husband? Debra would think. Will my name be Debra Thompson? It doesn't work. She would think to herself, I must stop seeing Bob, or else I could turn into Debra Thompson.

Blue turtles rising from the surf, struggling over the lemons, their tiny-clawed turtle legs grappling and slipping on the lemon-oily lemons. Rainbow colors raining from the sky. Smaller falling lemons: raindrop lemons leaving green splashes on the shells of the grappling blue turtles. The sand was violent pink. The ocean hurtling purple waves to pound against the shore.

Bob sat in his creative writing class. The TA wore his hair long and dirty, always jeans and a T-shirt, always with printing or a silk-screen. Age the TA by twenty years and add a couple frugal knit shirts to get the professor. Pings of love tacked between the professor and the female students, between the graduate TA and the female students. The male students were dead to the world, comatose.

The women, professor, and TA were in a love war with artillery and exploding grenades, machine guns and hot napalm. The young men, dull as rocks on the battlefield, were completely oblivious, in a different world with unrelated physics.

Bob doodled. He doodled a lot in class - he had developed a certain ... flair ... for doodling. He started with squares, stacked, alternating edges, first empty and then solid. The squares drifted apart, then together again. Alternating a solid left edge, bottom edge, top edge, right edge. Between the squares, he trickled down delicate spirals of embellishment: leaves, branches, interleaves, crosshatches.