Lightning is flashing in an all too close sky, and the thunder echoes in my bones. I will be home soon enough, yet something keeps me out here wandering. Life changes in this weather; everyone moves like little animals scurrying to shelter and safety. In the sunshine it’s easy to believe in an ordered world, but after enough time out here, delusions about our position are impossible. The unlucky ones forced for some reason or another to walk so exposed retreat within themselves, not pausing long enough to make eye contact. Perhaps part of their fear is rooted in that sense that strange things are possible in this place.

There is a house over there, I see it often enough, yet tonight, it seems so different. It looks abandoned in the darkness, making a new set of inhabitants seem necessary, people appropriate to this world. I can people it with the figments that lurk in the corners of my brain, the members of my social inheritance who are not the model citizens of the sunshine world. I can see them in there, looking out windows, hiding in dark hallways. We could go in there.