You usually drive by the old building so fast that you don't notice it. It's just visual background noise in the overstimulated city. Today, though, something catches your eye. Up there, in one of the tall uniform windows, a face peers back at you and a pale hand scratches fingers slowly down the glass. Do they need help? Are they thinking about breaking through the glass and taking flight, back to the freedom of a simpler time? Are they remembering that one summer in the country, when everything smelled like sunlight and the thick scent of oncoming rain? Or is there just a gas leak in the building and they're overcome with fumes? The mouth beneath the curled Victorian mustache opens wide, wider, impossibly wide. Black eyes bore into your skull. Then your cellphone pings, you keep driving, you forget. Thereafter, each morning when you awaken, you grasp at fragments of dreams in which you're staring out of a window with the sun in your face. Your mouth itches.

     

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CONTENTS RANDOM