Untying the Knot
- It's almost springtime, and Annie doesn't want to miss it. She wants to be standing outdoors at the exact moment the seasons change.
- Walking in the woods one day, she finds an old, broken aquarium with a shed snakeskin beside it.
- Why would anyone carry a broken aquarium to the woods to dump it? Who knows? The point is that the snake rubbed up against it to shed its skin, which somehow got tied in a knot.
- Annie carries the snakeskin home and tries to untie it, but she can't; it's a continuous loop—the knot has no beginning.
- What happened somehow is that the long tube of shed skin got turned inside-out in the middle.
- Annie thinks about other things that are endless loops, like time. She wonders how the first humans understood the changing seasons, since they had no concept of years.
- Another endless loop is the spirit that seems to haunt certain places. You can pass through it, but you can't take it with you.
- Spirits, like the snakeskin, just keep circling around.