We hopped the fence into the backyard of the neighbors’ place. The whole yard was silent. No breeze stirred the sheets, pants, dried water lilies, shirts and undergarments hanging from the clothesline. The sliding glass door on the back porch was never locked and we stole into the darkness of the empty house and slid the glass door closed behind us, latching it. The neighbors were out at the lake for the rest of the weekend. Their house was silent, still. Dust had already begun to collect on the coffee table. I took you to the master bedroom and we went through the parents’ drawers. In the other rooms we sifted through the closets, pulled up the carpeting in the corners. In the hall we unscrewed the air-conditioning vents and shined a flashlight down the hollow aluminum tubes, whispering into the vents to hear our voices echo. In the attic we found old boxes of holiday ornaments and even a diary.

Of course, it’s not any matter of my concern, and I won’t tell a soul.

A spider burrowing within the belly of an angel.

I didn’t expect you to be dancing so much because of how sick you’ve been, but like always, you surprised me. Next time (if there is a next time), I hope we can even have a drink together.

Another thousand years.

Tests at the hospital never end.

In a problematic revision of one elderly neighbor’s official biological make-up, several homeowners from a providential housing development in a seaside town harboring two minor graveyards and four religious establishments all of conflicting convictions have elected to pull their property not from the land itself but merely from town records, deeming fully developed and inhabited plots of land in excess of 290 acres completely up for grabs to experimentally advantageous out-of-town prospectors and land developers from as far away as the heights of Cape Town and the area just west of Silence Row. The elderly gentleman responsible for stirring this debate, a resident of 1506 Woodbury Hall Lane since before most of his fellow neighbors became working adults, has been described as now having an inexplicably keen night vision, a long, animalistic, raw face, and odd, unbecoming wings that poke out a bit from underneath the wrinkles of a tight button-up shirt that he is known to wear without an overcoat on even during this season’s rather nascent cold streak. In addition, his bony fingers are rumored to have become roughly the length of small scythes, with nails as sharp as razor wire. Younger residents attending the area elementary school, in the typically fanciful fashion of children’s fears made flesh, have now come to believe the elderly old man is a vengeful ghost.