Is this a dagger I see in my back? Do I have eyes in the back of my head? What happened to the eyes in front of my head, the ones right in front of my eyes, hanging from pieces of string attached to my hat? Those bits of string used to hold corks to keep the flies away, but I replaced the corks with eyes to stop people from standing too close to me, and then I put a tiny hat over each eye and hung tiny corks from the brim of the hat to keep flies away from my eyes. But now I can't see my eyes.
   I spent an hour considering these questions, and then I asked Jane about what happened to my coffee maker. This was her answer: "There was this bear, and then there was this bear, and they started kissing and cuddling, and I know someone called Martha who told me about her bear and I said, 'You're lying, Martha. Martha, you are a liar.' She said she'd hit me. And then she tried to decide what she'd hit me with and I helped her decide because I thought she'd end up setting the kitchen on fire, and the milkman would have to run around in circles because he's a bit wrong in his ringing head. She tried to answer his head when it was ringing but there was no one there, and I was going to say, 'Maybe you should ask for the fire brigade,' but she'd just say, 'Oh yeah, I was trying to decide what to hit you with,' and I'd have to help her decide in case she stuck her finger into something. She had a dream about getting her fingers stuck to piano keys, and she was married to the man who inserted himself into the ground near the river. She wanted to wear disguises and spy on him, so I said, 'I'll be Laurel and Hardy, and you can be... the air.' And she didn't want to spy on him then because she was happy just being the air. Are you still here?"
   I didn't know how to answer that.
   Perhaps I lost my hat. The eyes hanging from the hat are made out of glass, and the kids have often asked me if they could use them to play marbles. Perhaps the knife in my back was thrown by the one-eyed knife-thrower. His aim has been poor since he lost his eye when he looked at his watch and forgot he was holding a knife. Or he forgot he was holding a knife and looked at his watch. He remembered he was holding a knife very shortly after looking at his watch. He may well have been aiming at the target next to me. Or perhaps he was aiming at my back because I stole his glass eye.