Children’s voices shout out on the other side of the window. They might be happy and exuberant. Or, they might be aggressive and animal. I cannot tell. This insulated shelter I sit in mutes the world outside. Near me, the fridge hums, and the fish tank trickles, together dominating the scene. “Speak up, sonny!” I imagine myself saying thirty years from now. Is this what it’s like to be old? It’s something I wonder when I feel less spry than I expect myself to feel. Hm. Expectations. Those.

The goldfish are hungry. They are always hungry except when they are not hungry. When they are not hungry, they sometimes seem playful. Usually though, they swim around haphazardly until they get hungry. I don’t imagine they have big expectations. I don’t imagine they have a very strong sense of futility.

Something idle something devil something something. I would make the effort to string the right words together, but they’ve been arranged the right way enough times that you already know what I mean. Let’s have conversation 16B. Ah, that’s a good one. 276Y anyone? No? Not in the mood? Well what do you want to talk about? Just make it worth my time, please.

We think the best of times are those that are fulfilling, productive, stimulating, or simply down right pretty like a sunset. I’m renting me a Bobcat and I’m gonna make my yard go from this to this, one scoop at a time. I will have fun, and I will feel good about it. I will take pictures, and I will remember the day for the rest of my life with a certain fondness. When I’m old, and my wife reminisces about this home, and the pines, and the gingko, she will compete with the hum of the fridge and I will tell her to speak up. Then the next people will bulldoze the yard, and if they don’t, GOD will.

Mostly, I just want to get myself to the other side of the window, and walk down the road, and turn toward the rocky beach, and watch the pretty sunset. Because, oooh, wavelengths, oooh, rod and cones, oooh, lapping waves, and cochleae, and action potentials, and Copenhagen interpretations. Suns setting—any stars for that matter—make you wonder in ways that person-to-person calls can never do. And! You can enjoy them when you’re STONE DEAF!!! I have a feeling they’re not as great though.

A dense smog seeps into my pores. It does so with a startlingly powerful force, like the pressure of osmosis. It begins to thicken my blood which until now, had run thin like water. The sensation makes me shake. “Help!” I call out half-heartedly, testing the crowd to see if there are any who care enough to be listening for me in the first place. “Help!” I yell, this time louder, this time worried that those who hear me don’t care.

“I’m coming, my dear,” an old lady answers. Her voice comes from somewhere to my right. It is hoarse and tired, but its tone is urgent. When she is closer, I see that she is wearing red, bright red like the red of a tulip. She is short and plump, and she stands out from the grimy street like a toy truck in a sandbox. “What is it?” she asks.

I try to speak, but the air passes through my throat in a deep whistle. When I try to breathe in, I cannot. I feel a tightening in my chest, and the tightening accelerates until my lungs seem like apricots, dried, dense, wrinkly. I bend over in pain and stare at a crack in the sidewalk. A tuft of grass grows from it. Two blades are alive; the rest are paper bag brown.

Just as I start falling to my knees, the old lady reaches into my body with her pudgy fingers. Her hand passes through my skin, and I feel a sensation akin to the plucking of a string. She holds her hand steady, and for a good minute, she sings a tune in a language I do not understand. Not until she finishes her song do I breathe, and when I finally do, it is calming, and extremely deep, and the air that fills me smells of an imminent thunderstorm.

The lady pulls her hand away, and she looks me in the eyes, her own eyes dancing with flame. “Don’t do it,” she says, song and sympathy all but gone. Then she whispers, slowly, pointedly, in a voice that I can scarcely hear, “—ever—ever—ever.” She is not angry, but the words are passionate.

“What—,” I start. I don’t understand what she means. I have no idea what just happened.

“You will,” she says abruptly, back at a normal volume.

“But, I—I—,”

“And she’ll be wearing red, young man.”

The old lady turns her back on me, then walks away, more swiftly than I expect for a woman of her years. She rounds a corner and vanishes before I think to chase her down.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting orange.”

“Interrupting orange who?”

[blank stare]

[stupor]

I generally don’t steal, but when I exit a store without buying anything, I imagine that the cashier suspects I have merchandise in my pockets, which makes me uncomfortable, which makes me look guilty, which makes me look like a person who might have merchandise in his pockets.