By Dana Jerman

BEFORE HE CAME IN FROM THE RAIN, it was desperately hot in his room. A promise of an airless moaning furnace.

I was early. I sat, listening to change spilling out of my own pockets and someone two fights down practicing a mugging. Why exactly I wouldn't take off my coat because I wasn't wearing a bra, I don't know. That's stupid—like buying film the day after you lose your camera.

Whatever wise-but-crying fever-god looks out for women who go braless under black sweaters made sure Cody did not keep a cat. I couldn't take that. The combined stifle and allergy may have decimated my wafer thin absurd legend of will to keep every shred of soaked clothing on.

This is all way before I became his secret waystation. His repository of magical degrees of wife.

Then, I was just a pocket-wearing lover at rest in an apartment like a still life, with the downpour scouring windows and tinkling at the downspout. It did nothing for the heat. In waves it piled like plague victims at the back door of a church.

We were about to meet like a pair of broken glasses. We were blind then, and he could have been anyone.

Moons later, on that third floor at Cody’s, the sounds of Saturday after midnight would be delicious. From the cracked window I could hear people begin to lose their minds with uncurated pleasantness—drink and smoke and formless conversation peppered liberally with swearing. These were the modern adventures on the island of misfit toys. Each toy its own island. Down they drift on a street named after a random goddess parked like a black root over blasted earth.

I want to play, but want to watch more. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself while my breath extended my folded presence into the abused silence. Swatched in blue light and old music and a fetishized pilled blanket that wasn't mine.

This island would look differently if I was in charge. I would not elect for an ultra terrestrial forgetting. Responsible for spires upon spires of invisible real estate. Swollen with the argument of itself. All caught up in sizzling ivy and toppled moonshine.

Cody Pomeray’s room on its block weaved through with the resounding patterns of so many faraway car alarms. Meanwhile him all grown and snoring softly out. That ancient weightless speech of a half-drunk dreamer. Those sorts of dreams kept me up after a shiver spell. They only put him deeper and deeper.

To watch him and his place above the street, I had eyes open almost to the hour of the wolf. I was a witch who heard match-strikes bleed from the bird-patterned-paper draped walls and puddle into black sweaters which glimmered on the floor of me like rain-inked puddles that would always be still.

The skeptics at the entrance of my eyes. Twin bouncers leisurely evaluating the memory of Cody’s smile- itself an interface for the poverty of celebrity. Lonely as a phoenix on a long drive to the immolation place.

Anyhow, the wild beams, the limbs of headlights. They accost wet paves while we’re trafficking in the mantra of connecting spaces. Near the sides of testimony I’ve become the patron saint of hallways. Corridor queen haunting for good—double in brass to room and bored.

Cooler now, Cody grasps another clap of darkness. Again, his practical sense cannot evade the law. My hair cascades precise as broken mayday. My nostrils inhales’ squint like Egyptian violets. We hear the rats after he has made tea and the storm passes into history.