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Preface
Living in the Amber:
Conversations between Red and Greene
I am sitting with Maxine Greene, in my dream.
She sits at a small round metal table. The air is damp and grey but I do not feel the chill even though my hair keeps blowing across my cheek, irritatingly sticking to my lipstick, reminding me of my unsettledness even in joy. The cobblestone street makes the flimsy table wobble when she decisively taps her cigarette in a staccato movement on the glass ashtray centered on the table. We are smoking with gloved fingers, legs crossed, crimson lipstick stained on our filters, perfectly natural in another era, a different context. I see the smoke but cannot smell it and wonder if the haze in front of her eyes is just my own breath blurring my vision. I imagine her eyes are green but this is my fiction. We're sipping something thick and almost syrupy but it bites my throat with an echoing the way her words are electrifying my synapses—strangely fast, yet smooth and warm, gliding knowingness and recognition into my capillaries and spreading through my emptiness. I feel myself in the limen, teetering on the edge, uncomfortable in the brink but