In His Father's Backyard, Near the Stream

He woke in the early chill hours of a spring morning, mist filling the yard as if it were some chugging, over-worked humidifier whose vapors had begun to mingle with smoke.  Peter’s eyes were closed, their lids so swollen they could not part more than a hair’s width.  His first waking awareness, actually a thought in the middle-ground between the velvety suffocation of his dream and his waking, was of his breathing.  He felt inside him a great system, like an abandoned sewer made home by a league of trolls.  Fire-breathing furnaces amassed clouds of smoke which wafted down and around the tunnels like some ever migrating clog of hair.