Fresh Cut Grass

Jonica snapped awake, thrown from a deep sleep by yet another nightmare. It was still about an hour before dawn and it took her almost a minute to realize that she was in her chilly Manhattan studio apartment. She'd only been living there for a couple of months and wasn't used to the strange, new surroundings yet, especially at four thirty in the morning.

Partially because of the cold air outside her cocoon of blankets and partially from the nightmare, Jonica felt wide awake. However, rather than rising from her futon bed to begin her day, she rolled over toward her apartment's lone window. Through it, she could barely see the night sky above the building across the street. Listening to the dull hum of her building-controlled radiator, Jonica found a star and made a wish that things would get better, that the nightmares would stop.

Louisville was far behind her now, but much of Jonica still considered it home. Her marriage to Wallace had fallen apart so quickly that she didn't really have time to say goodbye, but she felt that she needed a fast change to keep from falling into a deep depression. She wasn't sure that depression hadn't found her anyway, as she'd yet to find a job or meet any new people that didn't scare her. But she was determined to move forward, however slowly.

Still, there was so much that she missed about her former home, like her older brother and sister. They'd lost their parents a year apart over a decade ago, but they all stayed close in touch. At least they had before Jonica decided Kentucky wasn't for her anymore. She also had many friend still there, most of which she'd known her whole life. It was a good life for a long time, but Wallace had taken that away and changed the way Jonica saw the world.

New York is your world now, she thought. She made a second wish, one for fun, new friends.

There was a sound outside her apartment door, something in the hallway. It thumped and rustled like a plastic bag full of clothes being tossed up the stairs or, impossibly, falling from a considerable height. Jonica lived on the top floor of her building and the only other person on the floor was an older woman, a shut-in type, that lived across the hall. Jonica thought she wasn't likely to be taking out the trash at this time of the morning. She supposed that the noise could have been a weird echo from garbage collectors on an early run, but there weren't any of the domineering garbage truck noises down below. In fact, it was strangely quiet outside.

Another bag fell in the hallway. She noticed that the peephole in her door was dark and that the hallway lights, usually always switched on in the common areas, were out. Then the aroma struck her, the smell of fresh cut grass. It was unmistakable, the bitingly sweet fragrance of newly-mowed summer lawns. Jonica pulled her blankets up to her chin.

Since moving to the city, Jonica would go to Central Park whenever she felt more homesick than usual. Pushing through layer after layer of busy New Yorkers was much of the life outside her apartment, but the park offered an oasis of nature and city dwellers at their most relaxed. It was one place that seemed to have the smells that she remembered from home. However, she had arrived in New York during October and it was now winter, a harsh one at that. The smell of grass filling her apartment would be difficult to find in the city at any time of year, but especially during the likely beginnings of a snowstorm.

Jonica tore herself from the cocoon of blankets and eased her feet onto the cold hardwood floor. She stood up and wrapped the topmost comforter around her body as she crossed to the apartment door. More thumps of more bags hit out in the hallway. She unlocked the door and made a third wish, one that she hoped would negate the first one. She wished that the noise and the stink were all a part of a new nightmare, that she'd wake up in sunlight, even if it was under a Kentucky sun.

But then the door rattled as more bags fell against it from the hallway. The smell of grass was so strong, a rancid stench of rotting chlorophyll and foul dirt. Jonica took a deep breath and threw open the door.

Her tiny apartment was almost immediately filled with a wave of dark, thick-lined garbage bags. They were stacked beyond the height of her door and had filled the entire hallway, quickly spilling over and past Jonica as she involuntarily screamed out. And as the heavy duty bags hit the floor and walls of the apartment, the bags tore open, exploding with heaps of fresh cut grass. The odor was overwhelming, sick and putrid. The green leaf volatiles stung Jonica's exposed skin as she tripped and fell into the mounting pile.

Wallace always mowed the yard back at their home in Louisville. He wasn't a very athletic type, but he hated the idea of paying somebody to do a job he could do himself. Jonica used to joke that one day their kids would take over the lawn care duties, but that was more or less just to needle him, Mr. Careful who never wanted children. One time, Wallace had responded by throwing a clump of the fresh cut grass into Jonica's face. She didn't blame him for the playful act, but some chemical that he'd added to make the grass grow thicker caused her skin to break out into a nasty rash that never entirely left her.

Now, Jonica struggled to pull herself up through the dark mounds of clippings that surrounded and covered her. The smothering grass filled her mouth, causing her to spit and cough. Jonica's skin burned as she clawed her way to her feet, wiping the leafy blades from her eyes.

It was still dark in her apartment, but reflected light bounced across the sticky grass that reached halfway up the walls. When Jonica reached the top, she found Wallace's body resting against a dense pile of grass. He was lying next to his whore, the girl that he had impregnated. They were positioned the same way that Jonica had left them in Kentucky, the girl with her hand raised to her slit throat and Wallace clutching the stab wound at his chest. They had tried to calmly explain their situation to Jonica back in Kentucky, but she hadn't listened for very long.

Seeing them again now these two chaotic months later, Jonica had to laugh, even as it caused her to inhale more clumps of decaying grass. Whatever demon had sent Wallace and his lover to her had been with Jonica for a long time and she finally felt ready to meet the damned beast. The jolt from her nightmare had subsided and she suddenly felt very sleepy. She nestled into the grass between Wallace and the girl, drifting asleep with greater ease than she had since leaving Louisville.

Bad Memory

I'm relying on my memory less and less these days, but I think this all started about three years ago. I had gone to some guy's 25th birthday party at the James Chicago Hotel with my friend Fiona and her boyfriend Johnny. It was in the penthouse and I'd never been to a party like that before, everybody was trashed. The way that I remember it, I had a Developmental Psych final the next morning, so I wasn't drinking. Maybe that's wrong. I guess when I think about it, I can't imagine being there and not having at least one drink.

A guy named Lewis, whom I'd gone on a couple of dates with when I first moved to Chicago, saw me and we started talking, just catching up a bit. The penthouse had roof access, so we went up there to escape some of the noise from the suite revelers. The only thing that I remember from that is us talking for maybe ten minutes. Lewis had just gotten some admin job at one of the colleges and was gushing about the benefits. Oh, and he had grabbed a bottle of champagne from the party, so yeah, I might have had part of a drink with him then. But it wasn't long at all before I said goodbye and went back to the penthouse to find Johnny or Fiona so that we could leave.

I didn't see Lewis again until recently, just a couple of months ago at Tippling Hall. I was there with some girlfriends from work. Lewis approached me and pulled me aside. I was beginning to get annoyed that I was going to have to catch up with this guy every two or three years for the rest of my life, but then he asked me if I remembered seeing something on the roof at the penthouse party, some sort of UFO.

I thought he was joking, but then he seemed to think that I was joking about not seeing it. When he realized I wasn't, his tone shifted to very serious and he demanded that I tell him what I remembered from the roof. I told him, that we'd had a drink and chatted for a few minutes, and then he seemed to get unreasonably agitated. I still thought he was just being an ass, so I shrugged and went back to my friends. I didn't see Lewis again that night.

A week after that, Fiona (Johnny was out of the picture by this point) told me that Lewis had been trying to contact her, asking her why I was lying about not having seen the UFO. I found Lewis on Facebook and IM'd him to leave my friends alone. He IM'd me back almost immediately to ask me why I was lying about what happened on the roof. He begged for me to meet up with him again to discuss it further in person, but I told him that wasn't going to happen. I wasn't worried about Brandon, my boyfriend for over a year by then, finding out - and it was obvious that Lewis was getting weird and obsessive - but I used Brandon as an excuse anyway. I wish I hadn't.

I became a bit paranoid after that and thought that I saw Lewis everywhere. Commuting to work or out to dinner with Brandon, there Lewis would be - watching and waiting for me to tell him what he wanted to hear. I also started dreaming about the UFO. In these nightmares, I'd be walking alone at night and a enormous spacecraft would suddenly appear over me, blocking out the night sky. The realization of its impossible size would knock the wind out of me. Then Lewis would appear beside me, grabbing my hand and mouthing words I couldn't hear. The only noise that got through to me were the slippery, hypnotic voices coming from inside the alien ship, calling my name in both my language and theirs. Alena...

I began to get in trouble at work. I had dropped out of UIC's nursing program and switched to a business degree, which led to a decent job. However after the dreams started, I began making mistakes at my company, memory-related mistakes. Before long, these little coworker jokes about my needing a vacation turned into tense, structured conversations about my performance. My supervisor asked if I would consider counseling, but I knew it had to be a more serious medical problem, some mental dysfunction I wasn't ready to face.

The following Friday, Brandon sent me a text asking me to meet him that night at a hotel restaurant downtown. I wasn't much in the mood at first, but I found myself getting more and more excited that maybe he wanted to propose. Or at least ask me to move in together. I didn't need a ring, but I was sure that Brandon was the man I wanted to be with. A ring would be something though.

I arrived at the restaurant and scanned the dining room for Brandon. However, it was Lewis's voice that grabbed my attention, suddenly standing beside me as he had in so many dreams. Unlike the dream, I could hear him quite clearly. He said that Brandon was fine, but that I needed to come to the roof with him. My memory really had faded because it took me until that moment to realized what hotel I was standing in. Welcome back to the James Chicago, Alena.

On the elevator ride up, I asked Lewis what he'd done with Brandon. He looked confused for a second and then, embarrassed, admitted that he'd used a phone hack to send the text message. Brandon didn't even know it had happened. I could have killed him then, I was certainly ready to go back home that minute. But the look on his face when I had accused him of abducting Brandon told me he was probably harmless. Beside, I thought maybe this could be the solution to my nightmare problems, as well as the restlessness that I was starting to feel creep into my waking hours. From the top floor, a stairway took us to the roof.

Once we were up there, nothing looked familiar to me. I thought there were several structural tiers and a view of Lake Michigan, but really the hotel's roof was flat with a couple of entrances and a view of several other tall buildings. It didn't scare me completely, after all it had been ten minutes three years ago, but it was disorienting.

Then Lewis began to set the scene and almost immediately began getting a bunch of details wrong. For one, he thought that it was Johnny's birthday party, that Fiona had rented the penthouse and we had all drank until very late. I told him about my UIC final, but he said that I had dropped out of nursing school much earlier than that. I told him the details weren't important, but he stressed that they were.

He then described the arrival of the UFO. Its structure and size seemed to match my nightmares. Apparently, it had hovered above us on that night, aiming a soft, hazy light upon us as we stood mesmerized for several minutes. I had then wordlessly left Lewis there alone to return to the party.

He pleaded for me to remember. There were tears in his eyes. This whole time, I had really thought Lewis was just unhappy in his life, that maybe his job at the college hadn't worked out and this alien thing was an escape from some other void. But after seeing the look in his eyes up on the rooftop, I was afraid for him. He really believed it happened and desperately needed someone to confirm his story, even if it was with a lie. So, that's what I did. I told him that I did remember the UFO, that I'd been to afraid to admit it, but he was right. A moment passed, then he quietly thanked me and I left him there alone.

I called Fiona the next morning to tell her about the whole thing, but she stopped me soon after I got to the part on the roof. She told me that she had, in fact, rented the penthouse three years ago for Johnny's birthday. She told me that I wasn't in nursing school at the time and that I'd been drinking pretty heavily that night, especially after I had returned from the roof with a mesmerized look in my eyes. She had thought that I had kissed Lewis up there, but all I would tell her was that I wanted to forget something. That's when I got scared.

I can't say that things are much better now that Lewis has left my life again, though I'm glad he's gone. I did end up losing my job, but Brandon insisted that he'd help out until I find something else. I hope that it's soon, because I know it's a strain on our relationship. I try not to look up at the night sky anymore, although if feels like I've been subconsciously avoiding it for years now. Also, I'm trying to pay closer attention to details and write more things down, out of fear of my bad memory.

Glowstone Point

Andrew found nothing enjoyable about camping, but he decided he'd do it once more for Lyla. Making Lyla happy was in his best interest, so he packed up the Civic and drove the 200 miles from St. Louis to Shades State Park in Indiana, determined to set up camp in Glowstone Point for one night. It had taken weeks of begging for Lyla to convince him to make the trek, but he honestly felt no better for relenting.

Andrew turned the Civic into the northernmost parking lot at Shades and winced as the park's entrance came into view. It was an involuntary reaction that he hoped Lyla didn't notice. He really wanted to push Lyla out of the car and jet all 200 miles back home, but he knew he'd never hear the end of it if he did. The dashboard display showed 55 degrees outside now, during what would probably be the warmest part of the day. Lyla grabbed his hand and squeezed. Andrew smiled faintly.

No reason to put this off, he thought. He grabbed his gear from the backseat, a backpack with enough supplies to get through one night, and headed toward the forest that Lyla had already entered, waiting for him to catch up to her.

Glowstone Point was about a mile away from the parking lot, but Andrew still knew the fastest way to reach it. Taking the left side trail through the forest, he and Lyla soon arrived at the wooden staircases, which winded down three landings until Andrew reached the park's low ground, Pearl Ravine. Lyla began to get ahead of him, practically running toward Sugar Creek. Soon she was out of his sight and he was relieved to relax the expression on his face.

Looking around as he trudged through the woods, he longed for music or an audio book, some external distraction. However, Andrew immediately reminded himself that despite the mind-numbing, repetitive display of trees, grass, and dirt, he was there to immerse himself in reflection. Anyway, he knew what he'd hear if he tried.

He heard Lyla giggling above him and he saw that she had found her way to the top of the ravine. He tried to match her enthusiasm for nature, but never could. Sure, there were more important things in a relationship, but Andrew wished he was the type that looked forward to walking in the woods instead of wondering how the Cardinals were playing or who'd be hanging out at Good Luck Bar that night.

As he continued walking through the ravine, Andrew realized that he was whistling a familiar song, "Sour Times" by Portishead, one of Lyla's favorites. Andrew quickly stopped and thrust his cold hands into his pockets. Soon after, the ravine flattened out and he could hear the creek flowing ahead of him.

Sugar Creek ran along the northern border of Shades and served as a boundary. The park asked that people not camp past its rushing waters, but many people did. Lyla and Andrew had themselves broken the rule twelve years earlier, and now Andrew would break it once more. As he reached the shore, Andrew looked across the creek to Canoe Island where Lyla Glowstone, or perhaps the thing that looked like Lyla Glowstone, stood smiling and waiting to lead Andrew north of the creek, up to the campsite that was named in her memory.

Crocodile

Once Nora had inspected each child's work space, she dismissed them to go outside for recess. It was Cindy's day to watch over the second graders' play period and Nora was glad for some time alone. She locked the door and turned off the florescent lights, letting the cloudy day's hazy light stream in past the drawings taped to the windows. Resting her head on her desk, Nora had the thought that she should turn on her phone alarm, but she was comfortable and figured it would be alright so long as she didn't fall completely asleep.

A few moments later, Nora heard a slapping sound coming from the back of the room, near the bookshelves. She partially lifted her head and squinted toward the darkened corner from where she often read stories to her students. She was worried that a child had stowed away as the others were leaving, but saw nothing. Assuming that an misplaced book must have fallen off a shelf, she lowered her head back into her folded arms and thought about Cliff.

Nora had been seeing Cliff for a few months. He was a handsome lawyer, divorced, with a daughter named Olivia who was in Cindy's class. Nora had seen him picking up his little girl one day toward the beginning of the school year and begged Cindy to introduce them as soon as possible. She did, and the rest fell into place soon after.

Cliff was a direct type of person, which Nora desperately craved after a string of aimless boyfriends, but he also had a toughness that kept her wary of his demeanor. He often said mean things about his ex-wife in front of Olivia and Nora worried how this would affect her. But she could tell that he loved his daughter and felt he was a much warmer person underneath his coarse exterior.

Another slap sounded from the back of the classroom and Nora's head jerked up. She felt groggy and didn't know how much time had passed, but it couldn't have been long. Recess was only twenty minutes long, after all, and the children were still away. Still, she felt that it would be better if she turned on the lights again and went over the science lesson she'd be teaching later.

But then a low, prehistoric growl sounded from the back of the room, accompanied by three more slaps.

A desk toppled near the back of the room. Nora instinctively slid her feet underneath herself in a crouching position on her chair. The growling continued, guttural and uneven. Shifting to the top of her desk, careful to not make noise, Nora slowly stood and saw a shadowy figure writhing on the floor. It was a crocodile, wedged between another desk and one of the bookshelves. Nora thought it must be a trick, a man in a rubber suit, something else, but it was simply there. Nora's knees buckled and she fell off of her desk, hitting the floor hard. Trying to catch her breath, she heard several more desks thrashed aside. And then the crocodile was upon her, its tail slapping wildly on the linoleum tile, its massive weight bearing down to crush her.

The slapping became a repetitive series of knocks at the door and Nora jerked awake. She inhaled air as though her lungs were unraveling. Lifting her head, she looked at the dark, empty classroom and coughed out a weak laugh. Nora tried to think of when she might have been thinking about crocodiles recently. Maybe she had seen something about them on TV, but Nora couldn't remember.

The knocking continued and Nora dragged herself up to let in whatever impatient child was so desperate to return to class. She unlocked the door and saw that it wasn't a child, but Cindy, that had been knocking. Cindy looked frightened, bordering on panic. With tears smeared across her face, she slowly managed to tell Nora that Cliff had come to the playground, ranting and covered in blood, and had taken Olivia away.

Friends in Defiance

Byron and Sheff met when they were kids and became fast friends. Neither was much interested in taking life seriously, so time together and apart was mainly spent goofing around. One day many years later, they got fed up with their dead-end jobs and decided to become criminals. To celebrate the decision, they married their girlfriends, Nancy and Nicole, in a dual eloping situation in Las Vegas. It was the best time they'd ever had up until that point. Being in their early thirties, they certainly weren't kids anymore, but Byron and Sheff were ready to finally start their lives.

The lifelong pals took time in devising their modus operandi and struck upon the notion to rob big rig trucks in the western part of the country. The plan would first involve faking an auto accident on some near-empty stretch of desert highway. A semi truck, they reasoned, would be forced to stop and the driver would get out to inspect the scene, giving Byron and Sheff ample opportunity to sneak into the truck and drive off. Later, they'd sell off the cargo and tractor unit parts on the black market for big cash, live off the bounty for a bit, and then repeat the process when needed. "Lots of semi trucks on the road," they'd often say to each other, which confused the other members of their friends' game nights.

Byron had a cousin named Kurt who drove eighteen-wheelers for various big box companies, so they started bending Cousin Kurt's ear on topics such as security measures and mean worth of typical cargo loads. With a cold beer in his hand and a colder look in his eyes, Kurt told them that most drivers wouldn't think twice about putting a bullet between their teeth before getting out from behind the steering wheel. This unwelcome information set the boys back a few weeks and made them keep their investment manager jobs at Merrill Lynch a little longer.

After thinking on it a bit, Byron had an idea that they would use clever disguises to catch their targets off guard, maybe dress as circus performers or famous movie monsters. This led to an argument over which random pairings of fictional creatures would win in a fight, but both Byron and Sheff agreed that it was a good idea to cover their faces. However, they would need a way to get the driver out of the truck, and Sheff decided that the best secret weapons for a robbery would be actual weapons, like firearms.

Byron abhorred guns, so Sheff set off to procure a couple of revolvers, one real and one fake, from an underground character named Joey Pistola. Even though he was the more comfortable of the two with the idea, Sheff prayed that they'd never have to use them, except maybe to knock out somebody by hitting them on the back of their head with the butt. Joey Pistola came through immediately on the real gun, though the fake one took a few days longer to find. This gave Byron and Sheff a few days to make their own masks, which was the second most fun time they'd ever had up until that point. And by the following weekend, they were ready to try out their plan.

Byron and Sheff agreed that the best location for their hijacking, a term they loathed, would be the New Mexico/Arizona border so that they could easily evade state police from one state into another. Federal officers would be a trickier problem, one that they kept pledging to solve at a later time, though they never did. They devised a cover story for their wives, telling Nancy and Nicole that they were selected to adjudicate an investing competition in Gallup, which was close to their actual destination of Defiance, NM.

However, much of the plan's inertia was drained by the long plane ride, frustrating car rental process, and an argument over their bill from a diner they'd stopped at for lunch. Exhausted, Byron and Sheff saw the truth clearly, that they hadn't thought of all the many roadblocks involved in their plan, like how to drive a semi truck. They hadn't really even cleared some of the roadblocks they'd checked off. For instance, Byron came clean that he didn't have any black market connections to whom they could sell the stolen loot. And for his part, Sheff had exaggerated his thirst to knock somebody out with the butt of a gun, admitting that he'd also elected for a fake revolver. Only his was a rubber one, making it even more fake than Byron's fake gun.

They decided to call off the plan, but took the rest of the weekend to hang out and check out New Mexico. They goofed around, as they always had before turning to lives of crime, and had a fantastic time. At one point, they even stumbled upon a competitive investing function taking place in a small event hall at a Ramada Inn. It was more Podunk than they'd imagined it would be when they'd invented the idea in order to lie to their wives, but Byron and Sheff were surprised to find that they were more interested in watching it than they thought they'd be. They sat down with a couple of cold beers and chuckled through a few events, not as giggly adjudicators from out of town, but as friends, lifelong friends with their long lives still ahead of them.

Hallway

It was more than just a dream. The events took place over several months. The world had a history and complex design. The relationships between the people were complicated, layered. Everything looked and felt so real.

But then I woke up.

It started with a picture that I couldn't hang. My wife and I had just moved into our new house and I wanted to surprise her by framing a photograph she had taken. I tried to hang it in the hallway, but the wall wouldn't allow it. It bent one nail after another, any that I tried to put through it. I ran my hand across its cool, painted surface.

"Forget it," I said. On to other things.

Then the laudanum arrived by mail, meant for the previous owner. My wife wanted to be bold, for us to try it only once. But then we tried it more, almost everyday after that first one. It took up so much time. Days went by, or they seemed to in the world of the dream. I had ideas that I thought would last forever, not that any of them did.

One night, I passed through the hallway and took a closer look at the wall where no pictures hung. My wife was asleep, had been sleeping for days, so I looked at the wall until morning. It was easy to look closely at things with my opium brain. By noon the next day I saw them, the etched symbols lurking beneath the paint on the wall. I went to the garage for some paint thinner and returned. I began my work, stripping the paint away to expose the wall's message.

It took several months, but so much happened in that time, more than I'll ever remember. I stopped messing with the laudanum. I traveled to other parts of the world and met the people there. I divorced and started dating again. Seasons changed in the world of the dream. However, I always returned to my work and, eventually, I removed every inch of paint from the hallway wall.

I stepped back and, now seeing the entire message all at once, I understood what the symbols were saying. I read the secret message and then almost immediately woke up. Awake and somewhere new, I repeated as much as I could to myself, desperate to not forget it. The message had told me so many things, much of it just for me to know.

But most importantly it said, "This is more than just a dream."

Eagle Point

One late summer afternoon, Patrick found out his roommates would be working downtown until past midnight. Patrick was excited to have the place to himself for the first time in what felt like forever. He texted Samantha, asking her to come over and hang out. He added a promise to order food from her favorite restaurant, an excellent Thai place that her family had been going to for years. Once the other guys were gone, Patrick began to clean up the apartment: the kitchen, bathroom, and his bedroom, which was actually the living room.

Samantha replied a little after sundown. Her text said that she'd come by for a bit, but couldn't stay long. Patrick was disappointed, but he reasoned that she had a lot on her mind. Classes at U of D were starting next week and, though Patrick hadn't gone to college himself, he imagined she'd have a lot to do before fall semester started. Still, he hoped that Samantha would stay longer if the food was already delivered by the time she got there. He called the restaurant and ordered her regular dish.

The chicken pumpkin curry arrived just after eight, brought by an older hippie-looking guy that Patrick had seen all over Dubuque. Patrick tipped him a couple of bucks and transferred the meals onto plates. But as he was doing so, Samantha texted again to say that she was running later than she had planned and probably wouldn't have time to drop by.

Patrick stared at the message on his phone for a long time, searching for clues. He did the math and realized he hadn't seen Samantha much during the back half of the summer and his heart began to ache at the thought that she might had moved on without telling him. He searched his memory for the last time they had really spent time alone together and realized it had been well over a month.

They had walked together through Eagle Point Park. At the time, Patrick had been focused on his music again, a reoccurring theme. He told Samantha that he was thinking about regrouping with his old rock band. He'd been writing a lot of new songs on his guitar and reworking some old stuff from when the band was playing a lot of gigs, just after Patrick had dropped out of school during his senior year. But he hadn't spoken to some of those guys in over six years by that point.

It didn't matter in the end. Not very long after that day, Patrick stopped writing new songs and nothing became of his plan.

Standing in his kitchen over a month later, Patrick tried to remember what else he and Samantha had talked about at Eagle Point, if maybe she'd mentioned another guy or something. He couldn't think of anything to that end and it was killing him to not just call her and-

Ames.

Patrick remembered. Back in the park, Samantha had asked him what he thought about the distance to Ames. She wondered how difficult it would be to transfer her college credits to the University of Iowa. To Patrick, she sounded like she was just thinking out loud. Not understanding what she was actually saying, he had told her it didn't matter where she went to school. He thought it was the beginning of a discussion when it was really the end of quiet transition.

Standing in the kitchen during his night to himself, Patrick listened to every hum emitting from every appliance in the empty apartment. He picked up his phone and texted Samantha back. "All OK. Good luck at Iowa next wk." Patrick stared at his sent message for a while, then brought a plate of curry into the living room to find something on TV.