43

It took a while but the Bavarian Cloud was eventually ready. Jody, Chris and Wolfgang each took a plate full. Jody was unsure if the dish was even vegetarian, made of meat, or what.

"God," she said, "it's an absolute sponge cake."

"Yes," Puck said. "Thank you. It's one of my favorites."

Chris ate her first helping in sixty seconds.

"I suggest you eat a little slower," Puck said.

"Awww," said Chris. "I'm sorry, but you even made my appetite go away with that blue thing and now that it came back, I was even hungrier --"

Puck nodded and gestured the ladle. He heaped more Bavarian Cloud on Chris' plate. A half an hour later her navel stuck out of her shirt like a caricature.

"Ohhh," Chris said. She lay on the chair agog.

"Wow," said Jody after a couple of similarly-sized portions of Cloud. "I feel so fat and happy."

She rolled off her chair and on to the ground by Puck's dining room table. She felt around for something soft. She vaguely heard Puck's voice inquiring dimly about better hospitality than a patch of carpet next to the dining room table leg.

"No," Jody said. "mm too tired to care. If you have a blanket, great, otherwise, I'm sure I'll be out in sixty seconds anyway."

To be so full you awaken on a surface you don't remember clambering to, that is how full she was.

Laying on the carpet reluctantly gave way to chilly. Reality was a little crisper now-- but it was cold. She clawed for a blanket and found one.

Puck is a real sweetheart, she thought. I just rolled my way out of the blanket during the night.

She looked around in the dark for Chris and didn't find her. She looked around in the dark for Puck and didn't find him. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep, only she didn't go back to sleep.

She opened her eyes again.

A metal bar of anxiety propped them open. She thought about finding a bathroom. Don't know where it is, don't need to go that bad.

She closed her eyes and was thinking about resorting to the horribly desperate measure of counting backwards from a hundred, or a thousand, when she realized she'd had a jumbled thought about the circus, and jumbled thoughts are a good sign when you're trying to force yourself to fall asleep.

She tried to tease the black hole in her consciousness, hold it open and make it wider. Almost immediately, she found it, or it found her, and she was out.