– 10 –

There are days when it seems like it is all an illusion.

After a while, Tom takes off the hat. It has not really changed him. The next few attempts do even less.

It is not until he slips while walking in the hat cemetery — plunges suddenly under the surface, falls into a hypersaturated morass and almost drowns there, choking and retching as he flounders until his hand comes up against a sturdy shelf of fedora and hardhat that allows him to scramble back up onto galea firma — that the dream-wroth takes him a second time.

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