further (regressive) writing from "amphibious"

Late that night, like clockwork, Randy wakes up.
He can hear Yagoro’s whispers, like scratches on the insides of copper pipes.
Randy gently shoves Donald Duck and Owlie aside (the soft tumbling of bells), and peels the ragged covers off of his body.
The air is cold to his exposed skin. With his first shiver, he realizes something about tonight is different. He blinks the sand out of his eyes just to be sure. The air around him remains suspended and cool, everything hiding within its skin. He glances around at the huddled occupants of his room: the bookshelf, the desk, the clumsy looking bed. Everything is painted in shades of blue or grey or silver. The familiar red warmth of his previous dreams is absent. Tonight, the colors are dead and cold and flat and real.
Randy creeps out into the hallway. The texture of the matted carpet grounds him as he passes, first the guiltless snores at his brother’s bedroom, and then the slightly distanced interpenetrating rhythms of his parents’ log-saws. He descends from the second floor to the first, the stairs unpredictably creaking beneath his weight. By the time he reaches the groaning front door, his bare soles numb on the frozen tiles of the foyer/laundry room, he decides that he definitely needs his shoes tonight. He shuffles his feet into his distinctly weatherworn pair of shoes, laces open and bleeding like viscera.
The sounds are too loud as he creeps through the yard. He proceeds slowly, and finds the wooden door in the back fence. He can feel the texture of the rough, splinter-shod wood as he presses his palm onto its surface to slowly push it out.
The weedelia field beyond is pale and washed out beneath a diffuse moon. The waxy leaves are dark and absorbent, keeping their reflections to themselves; the usually gaudy yellow flowers peek like countless cyanotic fetus-heads. Randy creeps on the dark pathway between the silent watch of the flowers and the moon, until he is before the maw cut in the chain-link fence. He gingerly steps through the opening.
The concrete slope of the canal is both rougher and more slippery than he remembers. He finds he must concentrate to keep his footing, as he edges his way through some vast and illegible spray-painted symbol, frozen and luminous. He reaches the canal floor, and feels the dry lichens and dessicated sediment crunch beneath his shoes.