And they might have froze before that noose got to them

All night I dreamed about dying. Every time—I was shot once, bleeding out; another time, I had some kind of wasting illness—I woke up instead of never opening my eyes again, but whenever I fell back into the dream, there was a different death to go through. Some of the circumstances, waterspouts, unmoored islands, shell-like crusts of uninhabited buildings in the middle of cities where I've lived, might have made intriguing story material if I hadn't been distracted by the endless iterations of mortality, none of them opera-clean. Today fails auspices.