It had been over a hundred degrees all week, and Sarah still had to do laundry. She waited for the sun to dip to where it merely sliced down the streets, instead of beating directly onto the crushed face of the city. Nevertheless, heat exhaled from the ground and caused droplets of sweat, falling from Sarah’s face, to hiss on impact with the concrete.

The laundry in her building had been on the fritz for months. Sarah occasionally sent an irate email to the landlord but was not hopeful. Lee’s Laundry, where she was heading now, was only a block away, and Sarah didn’t mind giving Lee more business. But in the relentless heat, it was still a slog to get there.

The black plastic bag containing their clothes immediately became slippery with the sweat from her arms. It was also heavier than usual because she needed to wash the sheets. Her son wanted to help, but being only six years old, he couldn’t do much.

“You are helping, Phoenix, you’re carrying Moo-boy, remember,” she said. This was a ploy to get his stuffed toy washed, too. Once upon a time, it resembled a cow, but Moo-boy’s insides had vanished over the years, and now he looked more like a spotted rag, caked with grime and bits of old food. 

Phoenix agreed and walked ahead eagerly. He liked Lee’s for the same reason she did; it was multifaceted and retro, like something from the 1900s. You could get lottery tickets and candy, there was a coffee maker that also made hot chocolate, board games, a claw and pinball machine. You could also buy metallic tokens to insert if you wanted to pretend that the machines were still coin-operated. She’d let Phoenix try this once, but he didn’t seem to care either way.

From an adjoining room, Lee maintained a side hustle restoring antiques. Or maybe that was his primary business, and the laundry was the sideline? Either way, there was always something new at Lee’s. You might see him tinkering with a 70s boombox, a malfunctioning robo-canine, or a retired surveillance drone.

Today, however, it seemed that everyone had had the same idea, and the place was packed with sweaty, cantankerous bodies. She had to elbow her way around and only just managed to grab the last dryer before a woman with a snarling poodle in her backpack could reach it. Perhaps on account of his age—he must have been over seventy—Lee made himself scarce on these days. He left his wife, a tiny, hunched woman with a scowling face, to manage the chaos.

Sarah stared at their clothes gyring inside the machine, thinking about the heat outside and this manufactured heat inside. It provoked some emotion in her that she couldn’t fully comprehend. Phoenix was worried about his toy.

“It’s OK, Moo-boys love heat, for them the dryer is like being on a giant rollercoaster,” she said.

 

Sarah felt a jolt of adrenaline when she opened the door to the building, and instead of seeing her son’s little chestnut head entering, she only let in a burst of dry air. She looked around. Phoenix had run over to a corner of the yard where a wooden fence with a scab of red paint met a cluster of San Pedro cacti. He stooped down and gathered up a handful of cement colored fur.

The kitten was old enough to be weaned from its mother’s milk and wander off on its own. Now it was toast. That’s what her brother would have said back in the day when everything that was finished, over, or done, was “toast.” There’d been no replacement for the milk. No kitten food or kibble. Probably no water around either. Sarah stood with the bag of clean laundry perched on her hips.

“Even if it gets better, we’d have to take it to a shelter,” she said.

Pets weren’t allowed in their building, and if the kitten were by any slim chance alive, she didn’t want him getting attached.

This sort of thing would not have happened in the suburbs. Not the one where she’d been raised, where stray cats were treated like local celebrities and trapped and neutered where necessary. At the first sign of a new litter, there would have been a gaggle of old ladies posting about it online, scouring the bushes, prodding at woodpiles beside the little barn-style sheds.

She’d seen a thin tortoiseshell feline lounging in the shade between the wheels of her car, with light patches on its belly that were eight obviously swollen teats. And yet Sarah had done nothing.

Sarah spent her days on a yoga mat, moving her computer cursor around so she would look active on the company’s productivity tracking software. Occasionally, she’d type that a word like ἀβροῦτες/abroûtes (eyebrows) in Ancient Macedonian could be translated as ὀφρῦς/ophrûs in Attic Greek, so that the company’s language model could have a more nuanced understanding of dialects from the pre-Hellenistic period. It was a stopgap job that was as hard to explain to her friends as it was to survive on. But it put her Classics degree to use, and at least she had perfected several challenging crow pose variations.

This wasn’t the suburbs. There wasn’t so much as a lick of shade from the freeway to City Hall. There’d been a few worn-out trees on their street when they arrived, but their city, like so many on the West Coast, had had those cleared thanks to beetle infestation. Now just one solitary palm tree curved over their building, and what reprieve its yellow fronds gave must have been gifted to someone across the street.

Sarah put the kitten’s limp body on a hand towel, balanced it on top of their clothes, and hauled the bundle up the steps to the third floor. Their elevator had taken a leave of absence that month. Once inside, she hoisted the towel like a gurney and laid it on the linoleum. Phoenix placed Moo-boy beside the kitten, as though it would be comforted by the presence of another animal, even one made of polyester wool.

She found the irrigation syringe from an old first aid kit and showed Phoenix how to place drops of water into the kitten’s mouth, behind milk teeth smaller than grains of rice. Then Sarah tried calling an animal shelter that put her through a cycle of options and then to voicemail. In revenge, she sent five inane push notifications on her phone to their virtual void before seeing one that promised a flicker of interest.

The headline read: “Our Twin: Water, Atmosphere. Life? Scientists discover Earth-like planet in our galaxy.” Accompanying it was the picture of a blue orb flecked with green and gold like a big lapis lazuli. The article already had close to five hundred comments.

Perfect, she thought, another thing for the Non-Earthers to get excited about. Ever since the Moon-village had begun accepting settlers a handful of nihilistic cults had sprung up that the media tended to lump together under a moniker for the one thing they had in common. They took the all too frequent natural disasters—cyclones, wildfires, the formerly “one-hundred–year floods” that now occurred annually—and interpreted scriptures to imply that there was something inherently evil and malicious about the Earth itself. Sarah thought the whole premise was absurd, but their movement was steadily growing.

“We believe the Earth is unregenerate,” was a phrase she’d heard one of their influencers say on social media. She followed them purely for research purposes.

The only definite thing the Non-Earthers had done was to get one of their evangelist leaders and his family a one-way ticket from Earth to the colony. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Sarah had posted in a moment of rage, but later deleted the comment.

Her son called out to tell her that the kitten still wasn’t moving. Sarah kneeled next to the towel. She put her hand on its fur, which was coarse and matted with sandy dirt.

“I’m sorry, my love, he’s…” for some reason, “unregenerate” was the only word that came to mind. “Unresponsive,” she said at last.

“Why is he not responsive?” her son asked. This command of the English prefix was something he’d learned from his father, as in: how exactly am I not reliable?

Sarah sighed, “Because he’s dead.”

It was Friday. And their Friday night ritual was to play “explorers.” Sometimes sea explorers. Sometimes land explorers. More often, they played Space explorers. They explored their way around the house, and then out the door. Explored down the cobwebbed corridor and the dark stairwell. They explored until they reached the vending machine that stood in its alcove by the front door. It was one of Sarah’s favorite games, and she wondered how long his interest in it would last.

She tried not to be mad if her son chose the same treat from the vending machine more than two times in a row. But she was worried that this spoke of some neurotic condition yet to be determined, one that would catalyze with force in puberty, turning him into an angry antisocial teen. And by then, what would be the state of her own sanity? More troubling, though, was the fact that sometimes he still wet the bed. She knew it was too early to be overly concerned about bladder control, but the fact that they were co-sleeping made it all the more inconvenient.

Today, there would be no game, no adventure. The overall badness of the city, its negligence, had pushed them both further out of their safe orbit just as the Earth was slowly slipping, millimeter by millimeter, away from the Sun.

They wrapped the kitten’s stiffening body in the towel that would go with it to its final resting place. But where would that be? She pondered the options as they trudged back downstairs. Their yard was mostly concrete. There was a park a few blocks away, but the hard dirt beneath the baked yellow grass didn’t look like something you wanted to dig into, even if you had a gardening tool. She couldn’t just put it in the dumpster. The roof? Could they offer it up for a sky burial? But people went up there to smoke, and she didn’t think any of the local birds were carnivores. The eagles and hawks of California were a rare sight these days, something for enthusiasts to find and poets to pine after. 

They walked back to the fence where they’d found their little corpse in the first place. Long ago, a tenant had liberated some house plants into a ditch beside the cacti, and a big terra-cotta planter was lying beside a chipped green dinner plate. Perfect. She laid the kitten on the plate, and over the top went the plant pot like a small ceramic sarcophagus, or a cooked tagine.

When Alexander the Great died, his body was placed in a fitted coffin of hammered gold. The question of how his body should be handled thereafter became so politically charged that his wish to be interred in Siwa was not honored. Proof, perhaps, that the powerful do not always get what they want. She wished her son were taught more ancient history in school.

 

Sarah made mac and cheese for dinner, which was Phoenix’s favorite, but their spirits were at a low ebb.

“It’s chewy,” he said.

“The Italians would say al dente. Isn’t it always chewy?” she said.

Her son considered this before saying, “The one from the bar is soft.”

What bar? Perhaps it was a place he’d been to with his father. Who takes their six-year-old to a bar? Moo-boy was on the table, and its face, the only part that still contained some stuffing, seemed to be looking reproachfully at the meal too. This is how he always gets covered in food, Sarah thought.

“Mommy, if we get a kitten from the shelter, will it be alive?”

After dinner, they put the clean sheets on the bed, and she let him watch whatever he wanted on the tablet. Meanwhile, she blocked the calls from his father, not at all interested in what he’d have to say about the situation: “Rats, cats, and roaches will outlive us all.” Or something like that, as though their evidence to the contrary were not even a blip on his radar.

She didn’t tell her sort-of-boyfriend, Tomas, either. The last time they met in person he’d joked that she was a pessimist, that her stories were always interesting but kind of “sad.” So she’d been making an effort to seem upbeat lately, although now felt she had far less to say. He was in SoCal that weekend for his sister’s birthday party; probably drinking beers by a pool and not all that interested in a sad cat story.

Sarah checked her personal email once again; she’d been waiting to hear back from the school for weeks. She’d applied for a job teaching English at a small private school in a town by the coast. The area was expensive, she couldn’t afford it on what she made now, but if she got the lower end of the salary they were offering, she could make it work. It was where Tomas lived. He worked for the school, which is how she’d found out about the vacancy. He wasn’t one of the teachers, though; he was in charge of maintenance.

She and Tomas had been friends at community college. But whereas she and her boyfriend at the time had transferred to a university, Tomas had been obliged to get a full-time job, and they’d drifted into different worlds. He’d apparently harbored a crush on her then, and ever since, but only recently decided to get back in touch, texting her a tentative birthday message in May.

It had not been a particularly happy birthday. Phoenix was sick, she was broke, and the list of people that she knew seemed to be dwindling. The city may have been a fun place to be a student, but it did not have many options for overeducated single mothers. She latched onto his seductive nostalgia with an interest that surprised her, because she’d never been attracted to Tomas. And what secretly perturbed them both was the idea that perhaps she still wasn’t, that this was just a delusion brought on by loneliness.

So it was she who was often the first to text, and when they arranged to meet up, she drove the two and a half hours to the coast. He’d become more physically attractive over the years, and yet certain things that had always irked her were still there: a tremulous emotional frequency, for instance, that she felt the need to stabilize with continual reassurance. But could she reject him over something so imperceptible? She kept driving out there, had done so every Saturday for the past six weeks, saying that she liked the drive and wanted to get out of the apartment for a change.

It certainly wasn’t easy to find someone to look after Phoenix, so last weekend she’d finally brought him along. They’d visited a fairground, and she and Tomas had fun stealing kisses while her son was distracted by the games. There wasn’t a false note until the very end, when Tomas ran into a group of his friends. He insisted on introducing her in a proprietary way and giving the strangers a far too extensive a summary of their past, while Phoenix became anxious and began making shrill complaints.

For these intangible and other blunt financial reasons (breaking her lease, for instance), she needed something concrete to happen. Emotionally, it made sense: Tomas was settled, and she wanted to change her life. But she didn’t want this aspiration to completely obscure her judgement. And though getting or not getting the job wouldn’t be the deciding factor, it would be a sign that she was headed in the right direction.

The hordes on social media were still going on about the planet. It was a sensational day for science writers everywhere. She told herself not to read the comments.

“I don’t think people understand how far away this shit actually is.”

“There go my tax dollars for the next century.”

“The sooner we colonize the better!”

“omg i just had a dream about this. no wait that was a nightmare (alien emoji, skull emoji)”

Most people were annoyed that they didn’t know how to pronounce the planet’s name: Hiraeth. Apparently the scientist who discovered it was Welsh and chose the name from that nation’s Celtic language. Sarah liked it well enough, the word had a romantic, nostalgic quality; better than naming it after a politician or some TV starlet. Sarah woke up when, at midnight, a scheduled brownout on their street began. Lying face-down in the darkness, her phone gleamed like its own world. She turned over to cuddle her son and felt a change in temperature; he’d just wet the bed.

 

Sarah’s childhood home had been on the very edge of the neighborhood. Someone had the novel idea of naming every street after birds, but only theirs, “Heron’s Nest,” was actually a home to its namesake. There really were a pair of great blue herons who lived in some scrubby trees nearby. This, and the fact that their yard backed onto the big expanse of a private airfield, always made Sarah feel that her family lived close to the wilderness.

With her back pressed to the worn planks of the tree house, Sarah liked to watch the small planes gliding home at dusk, followed by the occasional sloping form of a heron. She had a fantasy that the pilots were looking down at her, and perhaps they were nodding at her as they passed, and so she would nod in their direction, preemptively.

During her freshman year of high school, plans were laid to extend the airfield. They wanted to create another runway and upgrade the clientele. Her parents waited anxiously for the offer, and then the day came when they all went to a steakhouse. Her father perused the wine list with a big steak-eating grin on his face and told her that she could go to any college she wanted, so long as it was in-state.

These days, when she thought about the house, the tree house, the hydrangea bushes, her trampoline, and her old room, it was tinged with the knowledge that small aircraft still use leaded gasoline. Which meant that if they’d stayed there breathing in those fumes, her son would probably have been born with a birth defect or disorder far more debilitating than the one she feared he’d eventually develop.

Only years later did she wonder what had happened to the herons.

 

Lee had a passion for killing orchids. Every couple of months, a new one sat primly by the cash register, and when the leathery blossoms withered, he moved it onto a mirrored shelf. Here it languished with the others, their blank stems curved like a question.

According to the man himself, however, the plants were not dead. She’d once made a quip about it in his presence and he eagerly corrected her in his expressive, truncated English, “They open again soon! You see. Wait, give water, not too much, that’s it, and then…” He paused for effect, and it seemed as though he’d lost his train of thought until, looking down at her son, he said: “What’s your name again?”

Her son loved this question and took the opportunity to shout it at the top of his lungs, disturbing an elderly couple reading nearby.

“Correct,” said Lee. “They phoenix!”

Sarah felt somewhat awkward about visiting the laundromat two days in a row. But the thought of keeping the soiled sheets in the house, even if she spot-washed them, made her anxious. What if they filled Phoenix with shame and exacerbated the problem? Her son at least did not put two and two together, busy as he was losing her money on the claw machine.

Her pastime was to buy a scratchcard. Always the cheapest one, the crossword. She liked this because even if she didn’t win, she’d never won anything, she hoped that the word search helped Phoenix with his spelling.

Lee placed the little purple square on the glass counter and then went into the back answering a summons from his wife, so he just missed seeing Sarah pick up a flier from a pile on the counter.

It was printed on low-quality paper in a faded monochrome, but she could recognize the design instantly. Biblical dystopian imagery with a lot of anonymous figures in military uniform. Images of happy families holding hands and walking aboard a spaceship, its doors gleaming with light. This gave the impression that all were welcome, yet in reality, ex-members claimed that these groups just absorbed all your income or worked you to the bone, promising a life of extraterrestrial luxury that never materialized.

Finally, there were lines waving through a starry sky overlaid with the text: We Will Never Stop Our Exploring. To Make an End is to Make a Beginning.

It took her a minute before she remembered. Eliot. Why were the Non-Earthers plagiarizing and misquoting T.S. Eliot? Though not the poet’s biggest fan, she still felt enraged. Plagiarism didn’t seem to cover the half of it. She hated them. She wanted justice. Justice for T.S. Eliot. Justice for the kitten. Justice for her son, who had to grow up in a world contaminated by this bullshit. She put all the pamphlets into her handbag, intending to dump them in the trash once she got home.

When Lee came back to the cash register he seemed tired, the frown lines on his face a little deeper. Was he a follower of this group? Was he paying dues to an ark that didn’t want any more of their kind? He pointed at her and asked, “Winner?”

Sarah had forgotten all about the scratch card. She quickly scraped the inky coating off the barcode and placed it under the scanner.

“Maybe next time,” she said.

Lee turned away and went to his desk at the back of the store, his creative space.

“Working on something interesting today?” Sarah said.

He nodded and waved her over. He had a collection of small, shallow, metallic drums on the table. Clearly antiques, as they rested on well-crafted hardwood boxes. Lining the walls of each metal cylinder was a motif: a little drummer boy, a man on a horse, a jumping cat. She complimented one that had a drawing of a little girl using a skipping rope. He put this cylinder onto a spoke above the wooden box, on which there was a hand crank that made the barrel spin. He indicated that she should only look through some narrow slits near the lip of the barrel. In this way, the spinning motion animated the drawing, so that the girl seemed to be skipping up and down on the rope.

“A zoetrope, how lovely!” Sarah said. Phoenix’s science teacher had taught him how to make a simple version last year. Sarah explained that the word’s Greek origin meant “life turning,” but could also be translated as “wheel of life.”

Lee nodded. He indicated another version, this one had a circle of small rectangular mirrors at the center, which was a better way of viewing the illusion.

“You know the name of this one?” When she shook her head, he said, “Praxinoscope.”

“That means something like: action viewer,” she said. But Lee was a practical person; he didn’t care what an object was called. His job was to restore its function. Today, he was repairing the hand crank mechanism on one of the boxes.

Sarah called her son over to look at the vintage toy, but he was bored in seconds and wanted money to play pinball.

“Not right now, go and check that machine and tell me how many minutes are left,” she whispered.

She asked Lee if she could take a video of the praxinoscope to show Tomas, who was also fascinated by stuff like this. As she filmed the little girl skipping, Sarah thought she looked a lot like an old doll she’d had as a child. The doll apparently looked like Sarah as a baby, which is why her parents bought it. Strange, isn’t it, she thought, that we give children little imitations of themselves. The wheel was moving. The wheel was standing still. She began to feel a little lightheaded and stopped filming. Then she realized that by leaning down to film Lee could see directly into her large faux leather tote bag at the stack of pamphlets.

“Sarah,” he chided her, but without much emotion. “These belong to my friend. One per customer!”

 

Arriving home, Sarah was just about to shut the front door of their building when something, a pale glint by the fence, caught her eye. And then another speck of color appeared. A ginger color. For god’s sake, she thought. Not more kittens. The mother cat, her eight swollen teats. So there could be as many kittens in a similar condition to the one they’d found. She told her son to guard the laundry bag in the stairwell and walked over, but when she arrived at the fence, the kittens, if there were any, were gone. Kneeling and placing her ear close to the moldering wood, she thought perhaps she could hear their dry, frantic breaths.

That evening, she let her son watch a full-length movie, something with both aliens and pirates in it. Although he fell asleep long before the rival groups met, and before the swashbucklers boarded the spaceship with their guns blazing.

Scrolling on her phone, she saw another article about the real-world hunt for extraterrestrials. On the newly discovered planet, scientists had detected a cocktail of Earth-like chemical biosignatures that would be hard to explain without the presence of life. These were methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and something called dimethyl sulfide, a substance which on Earth is produced by phytoplankton in the oceans. Some believed they’d already encountered it elsewhere in the galaxy, but the findings had never been definitive. These possible signs of life could be detected thanks to transits, the tiny drop in the brightness of a planet’s parent star. This light then passes backwards in time over many light-years and arrives with traces in the wavelengths that signify certain chemicals.

As she hadn’t texted Tomas that day, she sent him the link to the article with a snide remark about the Non-Earthers in the comments. But he was resolutely nonpolitical, and this brought her some dismay. The type to let the world glide by him, hoping that he wouldn’t collide with any of its unpleasantness, but even if he did, felt no need to understand the root causes. He was not particularly interested in science either, although he had a keen respect for technical expertise. She should have sent him the video of the praxinoscope, which would be more his thing. But two obscure concepts would probably be too much for one evening. Would it come across that she thought he was smart and that she respected his opinion? Or would it be just another example of her flaunting her decadent and impractical interests?

His response suggested that he felt the former. And he wanted to somewhat one-up her idiosyncrasy by pointing out the linguistic aspect of the piece, as he knew that this was her thing. Pointed out that he liked the planet’s name, and pasted into his text the article’s explanation of its origin, something that she’d only skimmed the first time.

It said that the Welsh word “hiraeth” has no direct translation into English. Although “hir” is close to our word for “long,” and “aeth” means “sorrow,” so the closest word we have may be “longing.” But according to bilingual speakers, it is still impossible to translate the unique sense of longing, homesickness, or grief. The loss of a place where you may have never been, or to which you can never return.

She enthused a little about that and then waited for his response. The ellipses that showed he was typing went on for a suspicious amount of time, especially when she knew he mostly used speech-to-text. Was that word making him sentimental? She texted quickly, saying that she was “so tired” because Phoenix had been crying all day.

“He wants a pet, all of a sudden. Not allowed pets. Hard to explain the terms of a lease to a kid. But his stuffed toy doesn’t seem to be good enough anymore,” she wrote, adding that she was ready to fall asleep and would call in the morning.

His text took much longer to arrive than the words “sweet dreams” required. Sarah stood up and paced around the room, on tiptoe to avoid waking Phoenix. She knew she’d hurt his feelings by changing the subject. But why, what had he been gearing up to tell her? She imagined that it went something like: “This word is funny, it’s how I feel about you, you’re always so far away.” Followed by the closed eye laughing emoji to indicate whimsy, or worse, no emoji to try to open up a serious talk.

And what would she reply? That she was sorry. For what? Sorry that she hadn’t been attracted to him years ago, and therefore wasted time. No, she would not be able to say that, even though it was what he wanted to hear. Because she did not feel that way. In fact, if she could go back in time, she would make every mistake all over again: shitty boyfriend, impractical degree, grad school pregnancy.

He’d been walking on eggshells around her all this time, hoping she wouldn’t remember the thing that had troubled her in the first place. Well, now she remembered. It was his tendency towards idealization. Of her, specifically. He kept her at a remove and then resented her for it. He elevated her into some unnatural place way beyond the real world because there was no real connection underneath.

She knew it was not going to last, just as she knew that any day now the school would email saying that they were not going to move forward with her application. And then she would have to confess that while it had been convenient at first, now she was tired.

There was something unsatisfactory about that paragraph in the article. It bothered her, and she went searching for other definitions online. She preferred a source that was peer reviewed, written in the diction she trusted. Sarah took out her laptop, which was the necessary tool for real research, and soon found the PDF of an academic book called Hiraeth: Contemporary Perspectives on the Welsh Colony in Patagonia. The introduction described the voyage in 1865 of Michael D. Jones and 150 others. Hoping for self-determination, to escape poverty and oppression by the English, they imagined a new country where Welsh would be the dominant language. Welsh people had tried this in other places but there were too many cultural influences that some believed would continue to dilute the Welsh identity. In Patagonia there were the Indigenous Tehuelche, Pampa, and Mapuche people, “whom they lived alongside in peace,” the author said. Sarah was skeptical of that last part.

Of course, they struggled to cultivate the land, only surviving the first winters with assistance from Cacique Francisco and other indigenous leaders who imparted vital knowledge and skills.  Yet in October 1884, while searching for gold, four Welshmen were attacked by Tehuelche warriors. One of the settlers escaped, but the others were killed, their hearts removed and taken away by the victors.

She’d transferred the PDF to her phone and was about to forward it to Tomas when the movie’s credits began to play, and this gave her pause. What was wrong with her today? Tomas did not deserve this scholarly passive aggression. At best, he wouldn’t understand what she was talking about. At worst, he would understand that she was making some thinly veiled critique and be deeply unsettled. Colonialism, identity, false utopias, skirmishes in the 1800s, what did that have to do with either of them? There was only one heart at stake here, and it was his.

She looked at her sleeping son, touched his downy hair, then remembered that they’d been eating popcorn and that he hadn’t brushed his teeth. Should she wake him up and do battle, or let him be? Should she tell him about those other creatures, curled into little palm-sized balls outside in their makeshift den? She didn’t want to do it, any of it. She closed her eyes and, for some reason, imagined the planet that was too distant for anyone to reach spinning violently like the zoetrope with the little girl skipping; those three hearts that had been so full and beating with hiraeth, growing cold under the bright Patagonian stars.

 

The breeze that night was tepid but pleasant. Neon music from a siren slid down a street nearby as Sarah walked to the corner store. The sandals she was wearing were fastened badly. She’d put them on in the dark, not wanting to wake her son and begin the teeth-brushing saga. She’d locked the front door quietly. The sandals made her walk like a drunk or a somnambulating patient. The store was frequented by people who did not have the time or the means to go somewhere better, so everything was always overpriced. She bought three tins of pureed cat food and a bag of kibble.

On the way through the gate, she looked upwards at their building’s solitary palm tree. She’d never considered it as anything more than an obstacle in her rearview mirror when trying to park. Now she followed its curve up to the summit, at the rustling fronds that merged into the tiny lights of a few stars, satellites, and the gleam of a plane passing. She would no longer nod her head at planes, knowing what she knew now about distance and what you could see from the air.

In the parking lot, she thought she caught sight of a lighter shadow moving between the cars. She pulled back the easy-open lid from one of the tins and placed it by the fence. She did not have anything with which to open the bag of kibble. The thick plastic resisted the grip of her sweaty fingers. She knelt lower, shifted her weight, and tore it open with her teeth.