He knew the disco had been a bad decision after an hour of flashing lights, electric organs, and a smelly, yelling drunk claiming to be, “The Gooch.” Yet, Milo’s life had been an entire run of bad decisions, and this disco paled in comparison.

His eyes were spinning disks, reflections of his madness. Expressions of the joy and mirth of simply being alive. Here, under the shadow of a crowing rooster, She knew there was a creature stirring deep inside him. A part of him he had put in chains so long ago. The secret he never thought she knew.

Evie had spent the better part of twenty years doing this, studying her husband, trying to penetrate the soft eyes of the man who loved her. Trying to find the spaces in between this life and his. Wondering about his thoughts.

They came, from out there, in their silvery-sleek, sublime starships. Angular without edges, impossible to look at, moving between the soap-skin barriers of pocket universes. Newtonian nightmares, the starships vibrated through reality without regard for force, inertia, mass or effect.

Duke waited quietly for his Mom to look up from the hole where his Father now lay. He looked back at the front-loader. A big, yellow machine waiting discreetly out of sight, to come bury his Father. From here on out, they were all temporary. “This”, he thought, “is how it will end for all of us.”

She grew up in white vinyl-sided, two-story walk-outs. Treed boulevards and straight, paved roads. Shared driveways and manicured lawns. A constellation of streetlights showed her way home at night. He grew up down there. Old buildings with missing windows, and faded, forgotten historical markers.

It was left unsaid, laying there between us. A set table for two. A late dinner. Fancy china and long-stemmed glasses. Candles. Fish with little pieces of some sort of green herb, and red potatoes slice and cooked in butter, salt and black pepper. Going cold in the silence.

Bear was old and grumpy and Rabbit was a baby. Rabbit was just one of the many babies born that day. Bear looked worried as Dr. Hedgehog stuffed Rabbit into a left-over stocking reserved for Christmas babies; and turned her over to Bear without instructions, and simply said, “Congratulations.”

There were two-dozen yard gnomes, all poorly painted, standing in silence around a self-made pond. Sentinels, surrounded by fairies, deer, little fishing boys, and all manner of ceramic horror. Menacingly filling his small plot, in the saddest, adults-only, gated-community in Florida.