My hand is pressed hard against the window, and I am looking at the bloodlessness of my fingertips and the soft cracking off-white paint on the wooden windowsill.

Maybe the changing decimal places send a buzz that fizzles down from the billboard into the cabling, through the machine and into buttons, shocking their paper thin flesh and pulsating through their nerves?

It begins inside me as a change in weather, a subtle dampness seeping into what I had assumed was stable internal architecture.

When my great grandfather died late in the night in Poland, we were pulled out of bed by our sobbing mother. Everyone quickly slipped into black clothes so we could comfort our immediate grandfather. 

I still had bell hooks. And I still had my grandma. Knitting’s always helped, too.

Though some might argue that the roses had it coming, blaming their lack of resistance, too fragrant, too passive, too much.

I dream of a deer drowsing, just like me, supine on the side of the road. I don’t know how I know it’s a deer because the figure in the vegetation has no head, but I wait to glimpse the curve of antlers.

Someone left their tarot cards and a book called Narcissism: Denial of the True Self in my room after a party at the old house.

In my memories, we’re still just clueless children climbing water towers, alcohol running in our blood, watching the forest from above, under the summer sun.

A brown glass decanter, bound in red leather. A sleeping pill bottle, unscrewed. A yellow pitcher. An empty toothpaste tube, A lightbulb, illuminated by cool fluorescence. 

She left in a flutter of perfume, cashmere, and the faint clatter of keys. The diffuser exhaled one last measured sigh of peppermint. Dr Clarke capped the pen, glanced at the clock, and opened the next file.