You know what I’m talking about, Dear Reader, when a door closes and it’s as if the wallpaper, something shiny and pockmarked, seals off the exits and you look around and can no longer remember a time when you weren’t in that room, sitting in that chair. The room might as well be tumbling down a black hole or balanced atop a flagpole in the tundra of Little America.

The conversations are double-helixes — twist and shape on the winding twine / around the spindle winds — toppling, evaporating as soon as they hit the pavement. Exhaling our own weather patterns, the collisions resulting not in lightning or hurricanes but a kind of wispy smog. The space between my bones unpleasantly carbonated. Rent-a-demons beating out a rhythm on the stretched skin of second-run sinners (The Virtuous Pagans, The Evil Impersonators, The Usurers, The Simoniacs). The kind of laughter machines would make, 01 ha 02 goto 01. Fingernails black and chewed. Tiny assemblages of meat. Jenga.

I shall never attend one of Elena’s parties again. The invitations always smell so good, though, is the thing.