••••••••

            “Can I help you?”

            Sehun’s voice is tired and monotonous, and he’s completely sure that the customer outside in their car is currently reconsidering all the other fast food restaurants in their immediate area, even as they hesitantly list their order. He types it up slowly on his little computer, even though he knows exactly where all the menu items are on the keyboard by now. He can practically feel the customer fidgeting as he sluggishly works, painstakingly recording what he’s pretty sure is more of a feast than an order before reading off the price and instructing them to go to the window that he isn’t currently tending to. His co-worker Kyungsoo glares at him from the other window, where he’s been stationed at.

            “Do you really have to give me all the customers?” he grumbles, ambling off to start the twelve drinks they’d ordered. Sehun shrugs, ignoring the new people waiting at the drive-thru to take a swig of his water bottle.

            “Better they see your cheery face than mine.”

            “It’s hard to be cheery when you’re sitting over there in a bubble of death.” Kyungsoo opens his window with an ironically bright smile, handing out two drinks and promising that the food would be out soon before closing it and knitting his brows in annoyance all over again. “Couldn’t you come to work one day without looking like you just woke up on the wrong side of the planet?”

            “I would if it weren’t true,” Sehun mumbles back, tossing his empty water bottle towards the trash can and very blatantly missing. Kyungsoo stares at it as if it were an offense, and Sehun shrugs without making any move to pick it up. “I always feel like I’m in the wrong place.”

            Kyungsoo finally scurries over to pick the bottle up and stores it in the recycling bin where it belongs. He sighs even louder in exasperation. “Then maybe you should find a new place to be.”

            Sehun glances over at him curiously, but he’s hurrying to the back where the grills are to ask where the party platter is. Sehun shrugs again, more to himself this time, before turning back to the drive-thru button and breathing out slowly. He presses it distastefully. “Can I help you?”

            This is the tedium of Sehun’s daily life. If anyone asked (not that they would – no one really cares much about Sehun anymore), the first word that he’d use to describe his life is boring. Everything is always exactly the same. Each morning, he arrives precisely twelve minutes late, citing traffic when everyone knows that there are zero cars out at 5A.M. Kyungsoo gets delegated all the cleaning duties, probably because he’s the only one that actually seems to enjoy being unnecessarily clean, and most of the workers agree that he’s the reason they have a 101 sanitation score. Sehun, on the other hand, sits on his Gameboy, sometimes retreating to the bathroom when Kyungsoo starts scowling at him from where he cleans the counters.

            When the place opens, Sehun takes his place at the first window because he doesn’t have the social skills to work at the front, and he always, always sends his customers to Kyungsoo’s window, who, despite his complaints, is much more okay with being generally friendly than Sehun is. At the end of the day, Sehun is let off early while Kyungsoo stays back to clean some more, and their manager, Junmyeon, always stops him to ask him if he’s been doing his best job. Sehun feels guilty every time he assures Junmyeon that yes, he’s super dedicated, and he thinks that Kyungsoo probably just has ridiculously high standards for employees, yeah, that’s definitely why he sends in so many complaints, just look at him scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, uh huh, he’ll come in early tomorrow, he promises. Junmyeon is a bit of a pushover, so he typically believes Sehun, even when he actually doesn’t. Sehun tries to make up for taking advantage of it by bringing Junmyeon a coffee to go every once in a while, when he remembers. (He doesn’t remember often.)

            Every time Junmyeon lets him go, Sehun sticks his tongue out at Kyungsoo, who slaps his own face in distress, making the most unearthly sounds of indignation that Sehun has ever heard. Junmyeon just beams and slaps Kyungsoo on the back, and Kyungsoo can’t even manage to throttle him like he so obviously wants to because he’s Junmyeon. He settles for pinching Sehun’s retreating figure between his fingers and pretending it has the power to kill. Sehun checks to make sure he’s not dead, sarcastically clicking his heels together at Kyungsoo as he leaves to show that he’s still alive and kicking, but he’s pretty sure Kyungsoo is just taking pieces of him every time.

            So that’s where they go. I guess it’ll kill me eventually.

            After Sehun splits from work, he drives the same way home, past the abandoned gas station that he stops and gets coffee at in the mornings, past the cow fields that smell worse than his ty apartment’s indoor plumbing and the trailer park that Sehun wishes he could live in, even though he’s terrified of trailer parks in tornados. He’d give anything to have his own place, even something as awful as a teeny mobile home. At least he’d have some land to himself, some grass to lay out on and space away from all the dumb neighbors, unlike in his apartment complex. At least he’d be alone in the physical sense instead of just alone, the emotional kind. At least he’d have a reason to always feel desolate then, instead of this swirling, billowing, encapsulating…nothing.

            Everything is vacant. Everything is quiet. Worst of all, everything is horribly ordinary.

            And then there is his old neighborhood. It’s not exactly the silver lining or the sunshine after the storm, but it’s something, anyways. He always looks down it, every day, but it’s the only thing that doesn’t feel like a broken record. It feels different each time he crosses its path – some days, it’s mysterious, but others, it feels the same as it did when he was a kid and his bus would turn onto it to let him out. He always puts on his turn signal when he passes it, as if he’s going to finally explore it the way he hasn’t let himself yet, but he never does. He always panics, scared it will be completely different, or that this part of his world will have forgotten his presence had even existed. He doubts that anyone he remembers still lives there, anyways, but even the prospect of them having remained terrifies him. He can’t imagine Jongin without a butterfly caught in the cups of his hands and a head too big for his tiny body, or Tao without the crooked eyeliner that he’d proudly applied himself with his little nine-year-old hands right before wushu-flipping out his window so his parents wouldn’t see it when he left. He can’t fathom a world where Jongdae isn’t in a beanie that envelops all his hair and mismatching socks that are so big that they wade all the way up to his knees.

            He’s afraid of the last scenes of his childhood playing behind his eyelids again – his mom passed out on the lawn, the people in their white suits manning the van as if a criminal were getting in it, all the neighbors peeking out their windows.

            He’s particularly scared of the idea of everything having advanced, and of him not being able to tell that anything’s different at all.

            He’s scared of re-seeing Luhan, too. Luhan’s laughlines, too old to be his, and Luhan’s outstretched fingers, too small to reach, and Luhan’s tree with its long branches, sturdy enough for two tiny boys to crouch on for hours at a time. Luhan’s face, twisted in worry; Luhan’s face, blanketed with fear; Luhan’s face, stained with resigned tears; Luhan’s face, marred by the tinted windows of a child’s protective services van. Mostly, he’s scared of seeing the real Luhan – the Luhan that grew up, just as he did, and that exists somewhere else in the world, just like he does. He’s scared of seeing Luhan as an adult, of noting how much he may or may not have matured.

            He’s really scared of meeting Luhan, only to have Luhan smile at him in the slightly diffident way he does with people he doesn’t know and introduce himself all over again.

            Sehun forgets many things, but the thing he’s most scared of in all the world is being forgotten.

            That day, everything goes by routine. Kyungsoo makes the same quips he makes every morning, afternoon, and night, and Sehun retorts with as many backhanded compliments about Kyungsoo’s neatness as he possibly can. Junmyeon stops him after hours, and the conversation they always have takes place – “How are you doing, Sehun?” “I’m fine, just finished my shift. Did you know Kyungsoo squirted me with a spray bottle today? So rude.” – and, just like the day before, the week before, the month before, Junmyeon lets him off with his version of a “warning,” which is a promise of a pay raise if he behaves. Sehun doesn’t give a solitary  about a pay raise, but it’s Junmyeon, so he smiles and nods and makes small noises of appreciation as he scoots stealthily towards the door. Kyungsoo is going over all the tables with a Swiffer duster, his back turned to him, so Sehun books it out before he can fantasize about squishing his head between his fingers like a cherry tomato. Breaking tradition already. How scandalous. Sehun starts his car with a few twists of the ignition – nowadays, it usually takes more than one – and he begins his drive back. He nearly falls asleep and swerves off the road when he reaches the highway because of how mundane it all is.

            Can you die from boring? Because if you can, I think I’m already dead.

            When he reaches the point where he crosses the neighborhood, he glances down the path and flicks on his turn signal out of habit, but he’s far too tired to entertain any thoughts about attempting to follow through. The only thing he can think about is the last of his rose tea and the news, maybe a little video gaming (an old version of Mario Party that he’s played through at least twenty-five times because it’s the only game he owns) punctuated by a lukewarm bath. Maybe he’ll doodle in his well-worn coloring books, maybe he’ll practice doing the worm because he’s beaten everyone he knows at it and wants to keep it that way – hell, maybe he’ll catch up on Netflix originals in the corner of his apartment where his phone’s 3G picks up since there’s no Wifi. The possibilities are endless.

            He knows one thing he won’t be doing, and that’s extinguishing grill fires and typing up orders he doesn’t care about for $4.75 an hour.

            He passes by like he would any other night, leaving the tick of the turn signal on to give him a sense of rhythm, but the shadowed road feels stranger than usual. It’s the same mysterious vibe, but it’s somehow off. Even in the dark, he can see the deep greens of the forest backdrop and the mottled yellow of the houses and the rich reds of mailbox handles, and it’s odd because he can normally only make out hues of gray and grayer. It’s as if someone’s taken the handle on the world’s saturation and twisted it just enough to feel wrong. Something stirs in him, almost like a rat crawling around his insides, and he feels the same kind of queasy that he’d felt the time he tried cooking a meal for himself at the grill and gave himself food poisoning. He grips the wheel of his car a little tighter, turning to watch the road with a bit more fervor than necessary, as if he expects something to pop out in front of him at any minute.

            Nothing does. The colors fade back into black the farther he gets from it. Sehun tries to laugh it off, but he only succeeds in wondering what had possessed him in the first place.

            Near the point where he turns into his apartment’s parking lot, he picks up on some sort of commotion. He had taken great care in choosing a quiet neighborhood, far from the city life congested around his job’s location. He’d investigated the families around him, pawed through review after review of his apartment’s owner, and had satisfied himself that he was in a safe, secure, uneventful place, cheap and welcoming to his own colorless addition of company.

            The cacophony directly across from his complex speaks a different story from his research. Frowning, he peeks out the window without rolling it down.

            There’s a car stopped on the opposite side of the road. Someone is screeching out the driver’s window – a very angry, very drunk college-aged man, by the looks of it – and a girl on the passenger’s side is holding onto his arm for dear life, trying to talk some sense into him. Sehun can’t see much behind their tinted windows, and he’s not sure if he wants to stick around much longer to witness how the scene plays out, but suddenly, another guy is stumbling out of the backseat of the car and the yelling man is flooring it, speeding off in a swerving mess of a line. Sehun shrivels behind the wheel when the car swings briefly into his own lane, bracing for head-on collision, but it diverts its direction just in time to miss him and keeps going. Sehun glares back at it, honking his horn loudly. I’ll hear about that crash and burn in the morning news tomorrow.

            When he turns back to the boy who was kicked out, he notes that he has fallen to his knees, vomit pooling the ground around him. He’s pressing his palms over his eyes, sobbing so loud that Sehun can hear the choking sound of it. Sehun toes over the gas pedal, indecision bubbling in his gut. He looks longingly in the direction of his home, so close and yet so far in his conscience’s mind. He can practically taste the tea, hear the unharmonious blare of Mario theme music, and feel the slosh of bubble water over his body.

            He risks a look back at the boy, and it’s the worst decision he could have made. The kid has sunk to his side on the wet grass, gripping the front of his t-shirt as if willing himself to rip it off and quaking from every limb.

            He grudgingly puts his car in park. He isn’t about to make this kid drag himself up a tree to get help, like he did. He hops out of the car and slams the door, looking both ways before jogging across the street.

            “Hey,” he calls as he approaches. The guy doesn’t look up from his hands. Sehun stands awkwardly a few paces away from him, debating yet again on getting back into his car and driving off as if he hadn’t seen anything. “Hey, kid. Are you alright?”

            “I’m not a kid,” the boy mumbles with a small burp. Sehun wrinkles his nose in antipathy. “I’m legal. I have my ID.”

            “Sure, okay,” Sehun says, using his drive-thru voice to keep the kid from noticing his repulsion. “I’m not here to report you, anyways. I just wanted to see if you were fine.”

            “My fineness is none of your business,” the boy groans. He hiccups, and it causes his cheeks to puff out. Sehun is concerned that he’s dangerously close to throwing up again, but he doesn’t want to get close enough to find out.

            “Well, do you need any money to get home or something?”

            “I have money,” he says, then curses under his breath. “, I left my wallet in Minseok’s car, they took my money, how can I ever…” He breaks down into tears again, shaking like a leaf, and Sehun is bad with emotions, so he takes a couple steps back and holds his hands up.

            “Well, if you don’t want my help, I’m just gonna—”

            “Wait,” the guy interrupts. He’s finally looking up at him with bleary eyes, flapping a hand as if he’s trying to wave an imaginary white flag. There’s blood on the corner of his brow, in scrapes along his arms and under his fingernails, and his face is twisted in worry, blanketed with fear, stained with resigned tears. Even as Sehun takes in his entire visage, he’s drawn to the fact that the kid is biting his lip in this uneasy way, and Sehun is thinking of one of the last times he saw that, when Luhan’s mom was looking down at him as if he were a broken doll, and then there’s the picture of Luhan asking if Sehun was still scared playing in the back of his mind, and all of the air in his lungs vacates the second he realizes that this frightened boy is—

            “Can you take me home?”

            Sehun can’t speak quite yet because he’s too busy processing and focusing on the fact that he’s no longer capable of unconscious breathing. He puts both of his hands on his head, stepping away from the crouched figure for a second to regain his grasp on thought. Then, he breathes out and turns back to Luhan – Luhan, who had cried cobalt tears when he left and is crying them all over again now. “Sure. Why not. Why the hell not.”

            When Luhan stands, he falls all over again, and Sehun steps toward him but doesn’t help him up because he’s scared to touch him. His hands are still as small as they were ten years ago, when he’d interlaced their fingers in his bed and laughed at the thought of ever leaving Sehun, and although his body has gotten taller, he’s still shorter than Sehun, if only a little. That had always been a sore point when they were still children – even though Sehun was younger, he was always the taller of the two, and Luhan always stood on his tiptoes around him so he’d look like the hyung. Remembering this makes Sehun ache a little inside, and the cramp in his chest only intensifies when Luhan finally stands, squints directly at Sehun’s face, and says, “Have I met you before?”

            Sehun guesses his face has changed. His hair definitely has – it’s now an array of autumn colors pasted on ivory that he’d decided to get on a whim. (He’d kept it because Kyungsoo constantly gawks at it as if it were the stupidest thing in the world, and Sehun thinks it’s funny when his mouth hangs open that far.) His jawline is more defined than it was back in the day, when he still had his child fat, and his body has similarly slimmed out. If he’s honest, he looks more like a pencil mark than a human being.

            It still hurts all the same. Luhan tilts his head, waiting for an answer, and Sehun smiles ruefully.

            “Nope. Never met you before tonight.” Sehun gestures to his car, still parked and running across the street. “My car’s over there. If you can make it to the passenger’s side on your own, I’ll give you a lift.”

            “Won’t you help me walk?” Luhan whines, his bottom lip jutting out. Sehun flashes back to all the times Luhan has made that exact face, back when his face was just as fat as Sehun’s but still somehow twice as pretty. He’d never been able to say no to Luhan before when he pulled that face.

            If there’s anything Sehun’s learned the hard way, however, it’s that, over time, flawed practices can evolve, and senses of obligation can shift. He waves a hand towards his car again before turning his back and striding over to it, getting into the driver’s seat and slamming the door. I’ll give him five minutes, he thinks, but it looks like it won’t be enough, because Luhan sits himself down on the ground as if in protest. They share a staring match for the entirety of time that Sehun has allotted, Sehun training his face into listlessness while Luhan tires an entire spectrum of emotions. When it’s up, Sehun bites his lip before realizing that he hasn’t done so in years. He curses, putting the car in drive and backing up to make his turn.

            “WAIT!” Luhan is on his window in an instant, pounding at the glass. “I’m here, just let me in!”

            Sehun unlocks the doors and points to the passenger’s side solemnly. “Get in yourself,” he commands, and even he is surprised by how apathetic he sounds. Luhan curses some more, and Sehun thinks that the Luhan he knew would never use so much colorful language near someone he’d just met. Then again, the Luhan he knew would also never take rides from strangers, especially while drunk and after getting forcibly booted out of a car, and yet here he was, falling all over himself to get into the passenger’s seat and fumbling ungracefully with his seatbelt. Sehun looks at the road ahead of him, refusing to meet Luhan’s inquisitive stares. When he hears the tell-tale click of a seatbelt, he makes a U-turn and starts them on the road.

            “Where are we going?” he asks, face still stoic. Luhan leans against the window, eyes closed and mouth open. He swings his hand around in the air, nearly hitting Sehun in the face. Sehun ducks in annoyance, resisting the urge to swat at his fluttering fingers.

            “A neighborhood,” he slurs. “It’s really close by. You can’t…miss it.”

            Sehun sets his jaw. He knows exactly where Luhan is talking about, but he isn’t ready. Not yet. Not tonight, when all he wants to do now is to sleep off all of his forlornness – to dream, for a few hours, that he isn’t alone. Now that he truly isn’t, he feels even more solitary than before. It’s as if having Luhan here, half-asleep and barely capable of recognizing his own hand, is more like having a giant void in his passenger’s seat, open and all the matter of Sehun’s existence into it.

            When it comes down to it, Sehun would have never forgotten Luhan, drunk, high, or otherwise. He wouldn’t have forgotten the way he smiled, even if he suddenly had purple hair or skin the color of the sky. He could have changed his entire face and Sehun would have known, instinctively, that it was the same Luhan that he’d huddled with in an old sycamore and admired for as long as he was a child – longer, even. Luhan was always meant to be the one who remembered things, like homework assignments, or his classmates’ names, or how many days it had been since Sehun had been home. Now, it seems that it’s Sehun who remembers, and Luhan who forgets.

            Sehun has never felt more isolated in his entire life.

            He drives to their old neighborhood. He already has his turn signal on by the time Luhan points it out to him, but Luhan is too out of it to notice. Sehun feels his gut clench, and he considers just dropping Luhan here and letting him hobble to his house, but Luhan’s crying again, as if he’s remembering why he got ejected from his ride in the first place, and Sehun couldn’t leave anybody on the side of the road to just cry. He turns sharply, before he can change his mind, and Luhan rocks hard into his shoulder, wiping tears and drool onto his shirt. He grimaces but stays rooted in place as he drives. “Which house is yours?” he asks, knowing very well the answer.

            Luhan points, and the first thing Sehun notices is that the place he’s indicated is sat directly next to a pitiful little tree stump. He feels a cold heat course through his chest and he looks around at the rest of the blocky homes, willing it to be the wrong house. He sees his neighborhood landmarks – the pond behind his old house, shimmering under the moonlight, and Tao’s old mailbox, dented from the time he swung his weighted purse at Sehun’s head and hit it instead. He notes the rubber tire markings on the road from the time that Sehun convinced Jongin to drive his mom’s car around the block while she was out with his dad, and he sees a ring of burnt grass, still not growing after Jongdae accidentally set it on fire instead of the bag of dog he’d had ready for Jongin’s porch steps.

            Luhan’s house was in the middle of everything, sitting proud and tall at the end of the cul-de-sac, as if it owned the place. It’s still in the same place as it was before, and so is the tree stump – exactly where Luhan’s tree once grew. Sehun looks down a moment and belatedly tries not to remember all the time he spent on that tree. He tries not to think about how it had looked, feathery branches stretched out against the moon. He tries not to see it in the backdrop of grey that settles in his mind.

            He could have very well succeeded if Luhan didn’t wave his hands at it and laugh.

            “That tree,” he starts, pausing to gather his thoughts, “was my favorite tree in the whole world, and a damned storm took it down.”

            Sehun feels a slight relief that it wasn’t an intentionally orchestrated demise, but he still feels the pang of want to sit Luhan on its old branches and talk him out of his drunken nonsense. He almost asks how long ago it happened, what storm, what day, if Luhan had cried at its loss. Instead, he stops the car and subtly wipes his eyes. “Is this your stop, then?”

            Luhan’s biting his lips again. Sehun can see it out of the corner of his eye. “Will you walk me to my door?” he asks quietly, reaching out to skim a finger over the back of Sehun’s hand. Sehun flinches and withdraws, looking at him in horror.

            “Why would I do that?” he snaps, unaware of where his defensiveness is stemming from but completely unable to stop it. “I got you here. That’s what you asked me to do.”

            “Because you’re a gentleman,” Luhan retorts, and it sounds almost like an accusation. “I just want to make sure I can get in my house.”

            Sehun keeps his hands far away from Luhan, who’s eyeing him expectantly, and as much as he wants to drive off into the dark and fool himself into thinking this night was a dream, he can’t. He kicks open the car door, and Luhan claps excitedly. “Just hurry up,” Sehun commands, walking briskly up the path.

            Luhan follows behind him in a slow waddle, staring determinedly at the ground to make sure the way is clear before taking a step. Sehun taps his foot impatiently as Luhan meanders forward. When he finally makes it, Luhan searches his pockets for keys and comes up empty.

            “I must have left them in Minseok’s car,” he muses. Then, he visibly perks up. “Hold up, I’ll ring the doorbell! My mom will answer, I know she will.”

            Sehun is a little taken aback – people still live with their mothers? – but he shrugs languidly as Luhan presses the ringer over and over again. A light flickers on in the top bedroom, and after a couple minutes of Luhan incessantly ringing the bell, the door flies open to reveal an ostensibly annoyed man.

            “What do you want?” he asks gruffly, and Sehun is completely aware that this is not Luhan’s dad at all. He’s too round, with too much scruff on his face and a far thicker nose, and Sehun is suddenly second-guessing his decision to trust Luhan’s judgment while inebriated. Luhan squints at the man, looking incredibly confused.

            “You’re not my dad—” he starts, but the man’s eyes suddenly widen and then cross, and he starts shaking his fist as if he’s going to pound through the screen door and into Luhan’s face.

            “You again,” the man yells, face contorting in what looks somewhere between endless rage and potential homicide, “how many times have I told you to stay away from my goddamn house—”

            Luhan’s face draws in to match the man’s expression, and he opens his mouth to make some sort of snappy response, but Sehun claps a hand over it. He bows to the man, apologizing profusely and stating that they’d gotten the wrong house until the man finally decides he’d rather be sleeping than screaming and slams the door shut. Luhan squirms, attempting to object as Sehun pulls him away. He eventually takes the initiative to bite Sehun’s palm until Sehun shakes him off, frowning.

            “Why are those people in my house?” Luhan demands, pointing at the bedroom light that has just flickered out again. “That’s my house. Me and my mom and dad live there.”

            “Kid,” Sehun says slowly, and although Luhan begins to argue that he isn’t a kid, Sehun continues, “How old do you think you are right now?”

            Luhan blinks. “I’m twenty-two,” he asserts, as if Sehun is dumb for asking. “Why?”

            “And you’ve lived in the same neighborhood since you were young?”

            Luhan screws up his face in thought. “I can’t remember,” he admits, but he immediately continues, “I know someone else in this neighborhood anyways. He’s my best friend in the whole wide world. He’ll help me. He lives right over there.”

            Luhan starts forward, raising his fist like a marching warrior, and Sehun’s blood runs cold when he notices Luhan’s intended direction. He grabs his arm, pulling him back and hissing, “What is your best friend’s name?”

            Luhan wrenches his arm from Sehun’s grasp and leans into his face. “Sehun,” he spits, and Sehun’s vision goes blurry for a few seconds. “Now can you let me get there?”

            “Sehun doesn’t live there anymore,” Sehun hears himself say somewhere in the distance of reality. He’s already checked out of that, but his body keeps moving anyways, directing itself on autopilot, as if it knows exactly what he would do if he were still in control.

            “What?” Luhan’s voice sounds apprehensive, as if his worst fears have been realized, and Sehun can’t register his face but he can picture it, just like he could when they were younger. He can see his worry lines, his furrowed brows, his mussed hair and his bottom lip caught between his teeth. He can see his glow dimming, the tone of his voice dragging his shades down duller and duller. He can see it, but he can’t stop it. He feels his hands clasp at Luhan’s wrist again.

            “Sehun’s gone,” he breathes, and Luhan blacks out onto Sehun’s front lawn, just like his mom had done ten years earlier.

기억 – II

잊다 1999-7-14

“I’m staying the night with Tao today.
He taught me how to roundhouse kick,
but he got mad when I accidentally
kicked him in the face.
I thought it was funny.

I stayed the night with Jongdae last night.
We made a camp in his backyard,
but his mom wouldn’t let us build a fire.
(We built a secret one in the tent, anyways,
and we only burnt a tiny corner of the blanket.)

I stayed the night with Jongin before that,
and we caught fireflies by the pond.
Jongin brought a jar.
I tried to tell him to let his go,
but he never listens to me.
Maybe the fireflies will escape by themselves.
I bet they don’t have
chronic dumb
like he does.

…
How many nights has it been?
I’ve forgotten.”