Perhaps it was smartest, after all, to collar your memories and isolate them, sedating the irascible ones, banishing the grotesques, systematizing the rest; maybe coaxing a lion into a wheeled cage on occasion and pulling it eminently around town for the neighbors to see. Maybe it was best to let only the of your impounded memories touch you; shadows usually being safer than their begetters, as for example axes and icicles and porcupines.