You are in a hotel room the window is open (black out side). The drapes blow as if a parade of ghosts is entering the room silently. It is a little cold on the night table is a red covered book with a word you cannot read printed gold inset letters on the cover. The night table is fake not wood. The sheets are the very fluffy kind but you have not felt sheets like these for years you think. You wonder something but before you open your mouth something falls behind you turn around and the metal clothes hangers are jingling in the clothes cupboard. You are wearing a white shirt and black slacks. I peek out from the closed side of the closet silently.

You stop walking in the parking lot. Looking around there are no cars but it is day. The lines making up the parking spots are painted incorrectly and this is why no one has parked here. The lines look familiar. The wind blows and the leaves turn over displaying their pale underbellies and when it begins to rain you are running on the sidewalk squinting against the headlights and windshield wipers and rolling splashes characteristic of cars travelling through millimeters of water. A staircase leads down away from the road and I am standing on the other side of one of its concrete walls but neither of us knows of this connection. You are staying in room 4, on the first floor.

The explosion only lasts a second or two, and then the street is blue and damp once again. A car's alarm whines for its owner, a whooping mimicry of any crying animal, while something long and metallic clangs and skitters along the gutter. I light a cigarette and lean against the concrete. I get that feeling that this is what movies feel like when they are real. I get that deep down bubbling dread that makes you move suddenly just to prove you are alive. I had been hoping I wouldn't get that feeling any more.

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