Over the weekend I moved as if through syrup. Maybe it was the weather: warm yet overcast, encouraging surliness in all but saints. One night I heard what I thought was dance music, coming from the house next door. It has been empty since its tenant, a drug dealer whose customers floated in from the pub across the street, was jailed last year. I heard no voices or banging doors, just a faint fey beat: the ghost of house parties past. The next day, I drifted up and down supermarket aisles, reading labels, talking to myself, texting, and looking up recipes, not really wanting anything, not moving with purposefulness, malingering really, everything you’re not supposed to do in the supermarket these days, but I didn’t give a fuck, I guess.

Nobody, or nearly nobody, was in the shop anyways, and I could almost imagine that there had been a mass evacuation of my area, but I hadn’t gotten the memo, and I was just walking around absolutely clueless. Later, reading about the billion sea creatures that boiled in their shells off Canada’s west coast, I thought, if that wasn’t a fucking memo to the people on this planet—?!

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Only the woods were full of beauty: dog roses, honeysuckle, fragrant meadowsweet, white blackberry flowers, the first pink spires of the rosebay willowherb. Unseen creatures shook and called from thorny shadows.

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"Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path."—Edward Gorey, The Evil Garden

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