Downtown is covered in a cloud. There is no sun in sight, and time passes without memory. The church down the block wavers like a mast, and beyond all the spiny trees and buildings slowly vanish into the shroud.
These days are like dreams, yesterday too bright and hanging on all the moisture in the air. Now enwrapped like an advent calendar scene, this world could be swallowed at any moment and without trace.
Among each of the homes in the mist is a stove on and a broth bubbling. There are few sounds that pass around, a crow panging or a bus lurching to a stop as a girl in an orange dress and a white dog haste across the street.
The thick air emulates a mystery. Each person removed from another, despite sharing one cloud. We retreat to our depths. Pumpkins slump on door steps with beads of sweat. No one hardly looks another in the eye out of fear of breaking the trance.
In the dreamlike state of this town, each soul is far off, conspiring the demise of their lives as they know it. Seeking foreign pleasure and ill-advised desires that might vanish in the mist as they occur. Those lonely are the most vulnerable.
Those alone are dawdling on, dancing in the dreams that never die. What better measure of self-assuredness, a lone wolf the sole renderer of his fate. In the cloud shroud, separation between the physical and the ethereal is minimal.
That is the trick to self control, rather control of reality? Sleepers who lie alone and wake alone might as well wake to their penthouse and maid, wake to their homestead and wife they pine for. Alone, pining, just as a dream eternal.
The lonely ones pace to regulate, fantasize themselves out of the low spells, only to become reckless in their cause. Desperate in the shroud and seeing reality drift off into nothingness up the slope of hills, morality greys too.
A lonely girl in an orange dress dreams and moans to a man not her lover, a man who passes eyes and brazen smiles. A man certainly alone; a man leading a life unfamiliar and unhinged on another. Why does one lean into these piercing thoughts?
On the stovetops, the broths cool to feed the children. Down the street, birds gather in trees not quite empty of their leaves for some private meeting. Those alone control the scene until the sun returns.
If snow comes, we might never be found again, dreaming ourselves back to and from sleep, the orange girl thinks. She hasn’t woken up in weeks.
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