It was a faulty dream. It was not for sale. 

It yawned, or the darkness yawned. It stretched. Limbs rooted around. It couldn’t contain itself.
  
It found a mouth, teeth, a tongue. It tried words: BLOCK, FOG, KNOT, THROTTLE, POT, LOCK, NOD.
  
It sprouted a tail. The curious curl made a question mark. Red, but not hot. It was calm. It pulsed quietly in the dark.
  
It added one to one, and then two to two. It smiled at its hands, its crooked smile in the mirror of the lake.
 

It set about inventing. First the flower. Then the window. Next came the book, the gun, the mountain, the moth, fear. 
  
It spoke the language of the bees. They took nectar from the delicate machinery of its words.
  
It died fifty times a second. Its screams were inaudible. We all remember funeral number 700,890,761. 
  
It lived in a city that existed only in the memory of a film of a book.