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The smell of gardenias and meat well done blew with a gentle wind up her nostrils and up and up until she had to stop for a moment to let the humming spin and exit. The streets were dark and quiet tonight. Stepped-on peach blossoms and fetal birch cones rolled meekly over on the sidewalk, or fluttered half-heartedly the way the paper on her wall would lift and subside when she left her window open. She did not like to thread through the mailboxes and cars. The latter she thought might suddenly disappear into the lighted boxes. But they remained complacently unobliging, so she moved away, to chance the buzzing and coughing of the going insects than endure the still ones' indifference.

Light pollution was scant tonight. The glow did not come from the city but from some straggling altostratus clouds catching a little moonlight before the wind swept them off the page entirely, a page which happened to be that unblemished hue of dark blue reminiscent of one night last year when a campfire had perished spectacularly in the early hours, though on that occasion an unknown city had glowed on one side and the clouds were delinquent altogether. She looked up and saw a plane flashing bravely toward the pinnacle of a pine tree, so she placed the pinky of her left hand on one and her thumb on the other and played a diminishing tune with the stars in between until finally, the collision took place and all that was left was her brother's voice in her ear, singing half to himself all the way from Michigan where the nights trickled away with foudroyant companions and inconsistencies and the soothing lament of maple wood.

A loud clang interrupted her brother’s conversation. She looked up to see the headlights of a swerving car silhouetting a man and his dog coming her way. They had trod upon an unbalanced drain cover, whose reverberating toll reminded her to lower her hand and her head and walk aside while the bright eyes roared past and almost did not miss her. The man and his dog melted once again into the night, making no noise after the sudden detection. How long they had been coming her way she could not guess. Between the things up there and her self down here and a brother in Michigan who sang half to himself there was no solitude. She had presumed, knowing nothing at all but her private opinions about the neighbors' cars and the summer barbeques.

Tonight, silent sounds were spiraling together in the open air, up and down, up and out. The man and his dog had already entered a secret room by now. But she suspected the universe still hung in the odor of crushed flowers all around, unfolded and bruised and quietly listening.