An entire neighbourhood holding its breath.

The afternoon lingers beyond its natural hour.

Something sweet has begun to rot beneath the immaculate lawns.

Two lives, a hundred possible selves.

Familiar strangers inhabiting the same peculiar silence, exchanging identities

as casually as neighbours exchange greetings.

A distant telephone rings inside an empty house.

Somewhere, a laugh escapes at the wrong moment.

The air is thick with the suspicion that something has already happened,

although nobody can quite remember what.

A strange intimacy between the ordinary and the unthinkable.

Even innocence has acquired suspicious habits.

And home, that most reassuring of places, remains just beyond reach.