1. Aggressive, sneeze-inducing seasonal allergies.

2. Lower back pain that sets in after approximately half an hour of immobility.

3. Paralyzing insecurity about my face and my body and the shape of my body being immortalized on television.

4. Inability to sport fake bullet or stab wounds due to latex allergy.

5. Involuntary rapid eye movement.

6. Allergic to the dead skin cells peeling off my scene partners.

7. Cannot leave my allergen-safe plexiglass cube.

8. It’s a clear cube that I live in and have lived in all my life.

9. My parents are dead and Godmother is my mother now and she says I cannot leave the cube.

10. She says leaf mold particles killed my parents and I should be thankful for the cube.

11. I watch CSI: Miami on the tiny portable CRT TV outside the cube through the slats of the air filters fitted over my breathing holes.

12. I imagine Horatio Caine charging through my door and shooting Godmother and cracking the cube open like a magician’s box and sliding on his sunglasses and saying, “The only thing you’re allergic to is living. Is joy. Is a good sunset over the Biscayne Bay.”

13. I have never walked and so I crawl out of the house and onto the lawn. I wait for my pollen allergy to atrophy my legs and deflate my lungs but it doesn’t and so I keep crawling.

14. The sky is dark and the storefronts are all closed. A man in dirty clothes leaps back and yelps as I scuttle past him on the sidewalk. My knees are beginning to redden and bleed from my concrete allergy and so I try my luck with standing.

15. I am running now and don’t know how to stop. I careen past the gift shops and onto the boardwalk, attempting to dampen my pace by swiping bollards and garbage cans.

16. The planks of the boardwalk are slimy and rotted. I don’t know if this is leading to Biscayne Bay or if I am in Miami or where Miami is. I am going too fast. I reach out for a lamp post and my momentum sends me around it like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. When I was not watching CSI: Miami I was watching Singing in the Rain because Godmother loves Gene Kelly and says he was one of the last great American artists and that dancing today is too homosexual but it wasn’t back when he did it. I am finally steady and I look out. There is no sunset and the water is black. I turn to go back but I am new to walking and step on my own foot. I hit my head on the railing as I slip off the edge.

17. The water is hard and it hurts when I hit it. I flap my arms and kick my legs but I am sinking. Bubbles burst from my mouth. They remind me of the cube. The air is safe in its little sphere, protected from the water, returned to its own Godmother—the surface. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Godmother. You told me. You told me so. After only a few short minutes deep under the cool fold of the bay, I am killed by my fatal water allergy.