THE BARN IS SILENT. All eyes are fixed upon the sleeping girl. She lies there, indifferent to their gaze: inert, dreaming, blank, detached. Innocence, some might take it for, the audience seeing her as if for the first time, as if she has been restored, through sleep, to her proper dimensions; she is only a girl, asleep, her hands folded neatly on her chest. She looks small. Her monstrous hands look small as well. The people of her town cannot stop gazing at them, at how quietly they lie. They watch her hands with the absorption of a poet, who cannot bear to look away from his mark on the page, the word he has left there.