When I moved back home I had nothing to do, nobody to see, nowhere to go. In the apartment over mine someone vacuumed at night. At first I thought it was an insect that lived between the floors, but there was no sense in that, it was too regular in its visitations; with time, the rolling of the machine became more obvious, the lifting or realigning of furniture, even the subtle shifts in pressure applied to the floor above. Only the footsteps remained inaudible. Dawn showed my car coated in pine needles and sap, but I didn’t need it. My job only required a keyboard and the internet. I edited work by other writers, some better than me, some much worse. I lived through email. I talked to people so rarely I forgot to make eye contact. I winced. I choked up. Sometimes I visited a coffee shop three blocks down—I made daily appearances for a week or so, to force myself out, to break the blockade I had imagined around myself. I’d work a few hours, or pretend to work. I’d sip an Americano and flip through a book. I’d type real phrases, or I’d type nonsense, just to be seen typing. I’d type out nonsense in long paragraphs, some of which I kept. In one, a man is visited by a horse who advises him not to sleep. In another, an equestrian statue in a deserted square begins to think; it begins to come alive, it dismounts its horse, steps down from its pedestal, walks through the streets, but the whole city is deserted, it’s a dead city. I had a theory that there was a lithified city under the surface of the one I had returned to, layered with artifacts of a past I would remember when the descent was made. There were moments, standing on this street corner or that, looking up at Pike’s Peak, as I could do from the table at the coffee shop, that I did see little blurred images, wavering reflections of photographs I could remember from albums. Pike’s Peak was black in the morning, blue in the evening, and at the coffee shop I would eat elk sausage burritos. I had to make the city my own again. Be recognized by new people. A bearded guy with a collie greeted me every time I visited, exactly as if he knew me, and of course I wondered if he did, although I didn’t recognize him, or know how he would recognize me. Every day he was there with his dog, lifting his chin to me like he expected his nose to wave. I learned to return the gesture, or raise my eyebrows in assurance of goodwill, or my cup, which made me feel stupid. Or I’d pretend not to see him, because I was typing away, and it was getting on my nerves to go through this every time I visited, as if I had become attached to his day. Perhaps it was passive-aggressive, because he saw me notice his feet, which were always in sandals, or rather his right foot, which lacked toenails. A detail your eye returns to. Or perhaps it was loneliness in a city he didn’t know well. He’d open his table umbrella, leash his collie, fill a metal water bowl, tip his head back in greeting, then step inside, without toenails, to flirt with the barista. Sometimes I would talk to her and he would appear behind me, silently; I would turn and see the collie leashed to the table, pressing its nose against the glass door, leaving a print behind. She would shift her attention to him—in fact, he had little to say, but he said it enthusiastically, and she was kind. She would tell me to visit places I knew already. Pike’s Peak. The zoo on Cheyenne Mountain, which had a snow leopard. The fossil beds outside town; you could look at rocks that used to be shrimp. And the Garden of the Gods, a geological formation that had been a mountain when the rocks were shrimp. I’d been there as a child, the photos existed, me in my short pants, red cheeked, with an overlarge cap on my head. Had I gone to see my house? Not yet, but I’d driven by on my way in and seen a woman working in the back, pruning. I returned along the creek on foot after about two weeks; I hadn’t realized the path ran directly behind my apartment and passed by the house, or even that the path existed, just beyond the stone steps that led off from the parking lot. I walked without looking too closely at anything. Lots of people camped out along the creek; nobody patrolled before evening. I was used to it by now, people asleep behind juniper bushes or dumpsters. On an island in the creek a naked man wiped his ass with a bunch of acacia leaves. It had begun to drizzle and his tattooed back was slick with droplets. When he turned around, his penis jiggled innocently until his jeans had covered it up again. I ducked my head and passed quickly, ignoring the Cooper’s hawk that swooped onto the tennis court fence to dry its feathers. A red Civic was parked outside the house. All the trees my dad had planted were gone. The peach tree. The shed, too. Wild grapes, small and pale, still grew in a shadowy corner of the wall. I took pictures with my phone, and of the trash cans standing in the right place. A box turtle had lived there one summer, in the pine needles. The pine was there. Not the mulberries. You couldn’t put up a hammock anymore. I walked around the side and photographed a cactus, the same one probably, if smaller than I remembered. The front door, the driveway. Even, without thinking, the car and license plate, but I deleted those immediately, then all of them.
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Addison Zeller’s fiction appears in 3:AM, Cincinnati Review, Pithead Chapel, trampset, minor literature[s], Ligeia, hex, ergot., and elsewhere. He lives in Wooster, Ohio.