The air swelled with moisture. It was as if there was no room left for anything else in the air, and so it hung like a boundless and invisible damp rag over this world. The people were consumed with each other, like small fires at the point where the chunks of wood begin to no longer hold their shape, instead surrendering their physical form to the raging heat. Their borders crackle into fuel for an expanding future. Can you smell the smoke.

Somewhere a mallard quacked its indifference and from the shrubbery an itinerant towhee weighed in on the issue, which by this point was beyond anyone’s comprehension. Other voices in other languages chimed in as the wind rose to whip us all into submission.

All of this is noticed, all of this is free, things we see but cannot touch, the feeling of watching something out of reach, a sound unheard but by a few.