Losing Their Names, These Things

His Wedding Gift, Clasped Round My Throat. A Choker Of Rubies, Two Inches Wide, Like An Extraordinarily Precious Slit Throat.

If Miss Means Respectably Unmarried, And Mrs. Respectably Married, Then Ms. Means Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink.

...in Their Millenial And Long-lived Patience They Knew Quite Well How, In A Hundred Years, Or A Thousand Years' Time, Or Else, Perhaps, Tomorrow, In An Hour's Time, For It Was All A Gamble, A Million To One Chance, But All The Same There Was A Chance That If They Kept On Shaking Their Chains, One Day, Some Day, The Clasps Upon The Shackles Would Part.

With That, The Poignant Charm Vanished. Inside The Fifth Machine, All Was Rampant Malignity. Deformed Flowers Thrust Monstrous Horned Tusks And Trumpets Ending In Blaring Teeth Through The Crimson Walls, Rending Them; The Ravenous Garden Slavered Over Its Prey And Every Brick Was Shown In The Act Of Falling. Amid The Violence Of This Transformation, The Oblivion Of The Embrace Went On. The Awakened Girl, In All Her Youthful Loveliness, Still Clasped In The Arms Of A Lover From Whom All The Flesh Had Fallen. He Was A Grinning Skeleton.

Drosselmeier Had Unwittingly Exposed Himself To An Overdose Of Reality, And It Had Destroyed His Reason.