My landlord invented damage to keep my whole deposit and laughed me off. He did not know I had photos, or that the city inspector I had already called was standing on his porch that afternoon.
It called me from the treeline in her voice, and it said the right name, and then it said "come out here" — and my sister has never in her life said "out here".
I counted the strides because counting was the only thing my brain could still do. Eleven upright. Then it dropped to four and it got faster.
I have walked the same block to the bus for eleven years. One Monday there was a brick house between two homes I knew by heart, in a gap where there had never been room for one.
Forty of us were outside for the fireworks. Everybody saw it. By Monday it was a weather balloon, by Christmas it had never happened.
I sat down for a job interview in a new city. The woman across the desk had my exact hairline, my mother's nose, and a birthday one day from mine. A DNA test later confirmed it: half-sister.
She was a practical woman who bargained hard at market. Every Thursday she left a plate on the step for what she called the neighbours, and would not explain.
A loud man shoved to the front of the bank queue, waving papers, demanding to close a big deal ahead of everyone. The manager he insulted on the way in turned out to be the one signing it.
A man across the street was waving enthusiastically, so I waved back the whole way down the block. He was waving at the bus behind me. I made eye contact with everyone on that bus.
A friend took me to a place I had never been. Before we sat down I knew the crack in the third tile, the broken clock stuck at 4:20, and that the waiter would drop a tray. He did.
A stranger sat beside me at the late bus stop and greeted me by my full name, then listed my street, my work hours, and my dog's name, smiling, as if we were old friends. I had never seen him before.
Lost on a country drive, I passed through a small stone village where the people dressed oddly and no one had a phone. I could never find it again, and it is on no map I have checked.
A guy rode my bumper for miles, flashing his lights, laid on the horn, and finally roared past me flipping me off — directly into the mirror of the unmarked police car I had been letting merge.
A colleague sat across from me in a meeting while, at the same time, three people on the floor below swore he was arguing with the printer. Same shirt, same time, two rooms.
Working the overnight at a gas station, a trucker paid, then paused and said quietly, "Lock your door. There is a man crouched behind your ice machine." He had been there, watching me, for an hour.
