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There was gray smoke aswirl round the train station and heavy fog with the odor of coal through which itinerants came and went, departed and boarded. As he stepped onto the curb a sensation of aimlessness struck him suddenly, one that he hadn't felt so acutely before in his life. The railway commute had been long and interconnected. Three stops at least and many days between them. It had been well over a month, he knew, since he'd bore witness to that blue infinity called the Pacific. Well over two, come to think of it. When in transit the laws of perceived time and space become rubbery and opaque. To sit back and relax and sleep and do nothing but read and think while the wheels beneath you whisk you away to a fixed, predestined point. It was effortless, and he loved that about it. He was one well acquainted with travel, you could say, and the railway was his favorite permutation of it. He'd become accustomed to living upon it, erecting a kind of camp that was stationary a...

They say about Florida it's not the heat that's the problem, it's the humidity. That's partially true (it's both), but to be sure there's no emphasis too great to put on the latter. The whole state is practically a sauna. If the sun isn't bearing its full face down on the top of your head, the sheer volume of moisture in the air is incubating like a wet blanket around you all the time, even at night. Prone to random bursts of rain just in case the atmospheric humidity falls below seventy percent. This protrusion of land surrounded three-quarters by water and the water permeating into its ecology of near swamp-like everglades. Green, vibrant sawgrass marshlands. And where there's water there are its inhabitants; big, small, and microscopic. Creatures cut out for predation. Invaders. This is a place where it's not uncommon for one to find an alligator in the backyard as easily as one might find a wandering rabbit or a groundhog that's torn up the l...

She had never been a sound sleeper. There was a particular restlessness that followed her all her life. Not quite insomnia, or at least not officially diagnosed as such, but a kind of stirring of the spirit. It could manifest as exuberance during the waking hours, and it was in those seasons that it felt almost like a superpower. The ability to drink deeper from the chalice of vitality, to burn the candle twice as fast and still have enough wick to spare. She'd just come off a stint of several months-worth of night shifts, of vastly higher pay bartered for some mild lapse of sanity. Most probably couldn't have handled it, but not her. The night owl. A nocturnal specimen more comfortable on that side of the earth's rotation. But once she shifted back to a less vampiric schedule her sleeping problems intensified. It was always the monotony that got to her. The silence that amplifies every minute disturbance like the surface of the water rippling, lingering after. Fans or ambi...

On that particular road was a curve preceded by a long stretch of narrow pavement. Two single lanes passing each other by at forty-five miles per hour. At one side tree-topped hills and at the other a reclining meadow. The overhang of the trees shaded the lane to his left, but that early morning it was freshly watered from the drizzle of the night and the day before it. The gleam of what little light there was mottling the blacktop. Rain. Not a hard downpour but a constant and incessant mist that seemed a malaise personified; the kind that makes you prefer the adrenaline of an electrical storm, that seeps into your pores with a musty stench drawing earthworms out onto the sidewalk. Gray skies and gray fog like the clouds pulled down from the overcast, thick enough to need your headlights on at 8:00 AM. It was an ordinary morning, as identical in its features as so many that had yet weathered the road more innumerable to imagine in the fifty-odd years since the asphalt was poured and se...