The girl on the stage was just starting her act. A hidden DJ announced her as Ruby, and was loudly trying to stir up some excitement without much succ...ss. Ruby was a gaunt, thirtysomething almost-blonde. I have to admit, she did try. She couldn't dance, but she could smile, and did from time to time. It didn't matter; nobody was there to critique her dancing or her smile. She started out without much on to begin with, which told me that this wouldn't be so much a strip tease as a nude dance.. Over the months, Cindy had been putting herself into trance by setting and starting the metronome, and then simply allowing herself to sink down and down and down into the familiar state of being that was a wonderful dream-like condition she had rapidly become addicted to. She looked forward to these moments ... she desired them with an almost sexual intensity. She never remembered what Stepmother had told her when she was in her trance ... and more than once, she had noticed afterwards that. He is in LOVE.As she walks down the hall, she sees ‘that jock’ ex-boyfriend. She ignores him as he whistles and calls her name, and “You miss me, Mary?” She shoots him a bird as he laughs.Her thoughts turn unexpectedly to John. Her eyes light, and she smiles to herself. Something of ‘twin flame’ dances in her thoughts. “Silly boy...” she thinks.In math class, she whirls in at the last minute, drops her homework in the box, slides into her seat, turns and slips his second paper back to him with. Lassie lunged forward, but paused, turning to her in doubt."Seek living," she corrected herself. She used the same command when telling Lassie to search for contagions and the dead.With that, Lassie took off like a shot out of the blue, racing across the field. Alice was unconcerned with plague-bearing insects like ticks and fleas in the overgrown grass. It was so cold few would be active, if any survived. The days of such pedestrian irritants were long gone. If anything of the old ecosystem.