He imagined the girl creating them in her sleep, actually dreaming their lives into existence, inventing the little room and mossy air and everything else in it. God, what labor! The breadth of detail was astounding. Take himself – his own body. Sure, she’d have to envision his face and teeth, his arms and legs and shoulders, but there were the less glamorous parts as well, the unsung bumps and corners: the knuckles of his toes, or that weird mole in his armpit, or even the invisible growth of his nails. She would have needed to start weeks … years ago, probably. There would have been restless nights, products of whimsy or indigestion. How else to explain the bones in his ear? If she were truly dreaming him (and why not, since it made as much sense as anything?), then the hairs in his nose were a work of love, the result of extraordinary vision. And after all that dreaming, the toil and concentration, how could you blame her for getting tired one day and wanting to stop, for being too wiped out to continue?

– Eric Puchner, “Legends,” Music Through the Floor.