Nina wakes with blue dawn light scooping out her cheekbones. In the café downstairs, the women peel. They use metal scrapers for sweet potato skin. It comes off in orange scrolls, wet, earthy. Outside, the city is waking too, and scarves of fog hang from the lampposts. The streets are grey, thickened with purple shadows. Soon they’ll run yellow and pink gold as the sun softens over the rooftops, pulp melting in the heat. Across the street hulks what’s left of the building that burned, five years ago. Slabs of concrete are now withered as strips of silk, all black. Nina dresses for work, but she isn’t going in today.

Nina’s apartment is at the end of the hall. This is where the stink gathers, of mildew, of things rotting inside the walls. She wades to the stairs, which are slick. Luckily she doesn’t need her heels today. She wears sneakers, sneakers she can get dirty. The women below don’t see her. Just as well. She doesn’t want to eat—too nervous. The city smells how it feels: shrinking into itself. By noon it will have expanded. By noon the buildings will tower over the streets, the cars will be enormous, and if Nina were to take her lunch break, she’d be forced to walk the thin tightrope of sidewalk. But she’ll be out of the city long before then, unless she changes her mind.

On the corner, the bus shelter is half-empty. It’s the later shift, the 7 a.m. shift, that clogs the buses and the streets. Few people get up for this early bus, the only bus which forks out of the city, into the countryside. Nina’s convincing herself it’ll be a good day. Next to her, a teenaged kid leans against the shelter glass. The edges of his nose are raw and peeling, red with bits of yellow. He sniffles into a tissue. George’s nose feels as though it’s made of sandpaper. Trying to plug the rivers of snot is useless. He feels shittier than ever. As another woman inches into the shelter, he can’t take it anymore. He elbows his way out, sneezes. Aggressively wipes his nose. He regrets waking up. 

From a distance, the bus looks narrow as it needles toward them, nosing past threads of cars and motorcycles and vans and a truck. George clumps himself into the last row, on the left-hand side to watch the traffic. He enjoys being higher than the other vehicles, watching their roofs bake into warm stones for lizards to lie on. Across the street, someone sells plums, peaches, watermelons with thick green rinds, and gold-nugget apricots. George digs through his backpack for the croissant his mother packed.

Ahead is the church, its roofs green, humped shoulders, doors closed and windows shuttered in painted glass. The last time George went to church was Easter. His mother dyed eggs, the same colours as the fruits from earlier. For good health, she rubbed the bright red egg onto his cheeks, traced cold circles on his skin. George wipes his nose. Just before the bus leaves, a man unsticks himself from a bench on the street corner. Ayando sprints to the bus, throws himself on board. The paper in his pocket crumples.

He almost didn’t come. He sits in the spot nearest to the door, keeps his legs apart so that he can rest his elbows on them, hopes this will keep his hands from shaking. He can’t look past himself in the window. Dark rings corrugating under his eyes, hair dark, curly, leaking into his irises. He almost didn’t come. Sitting on the bench, the green-roofed church rising above him, he thought it would be much easier to stay there. Not move. Ignore the bus as it puttered to the stop. Ignore the one that came after. Let the piece of paper in his pocket crease when he breathed. Watch the birds shit over the church and then, when it got late enough, go to work. Say he changed his mind about the day off. There was the critical moment, when the bus stopped, as it swallowed up the queue that had waited for it. And finally he thought of Marina and ran.

It’s been days since Ayando has slept. His bed is lumpy. Even Marina can’t warm it. He comes to bed late and lies awake until the sun teethes on the horizon, claws into the room, hooks the sticky notes on the wall.

If he can’t sleep in his own bed, why should he sleep anywhere else? But he does here, conversation clouding around him, listening to somebody’s sniffles at the back of the bus. Ayando dreams of work. He’s a dishwasher in a restaurant. Even though he wears rubber gloves, he’s developed callouses that harden and smooth out his palms like the wide, round cobblestones in the older streets. A window is open. Out in the purple-rayed city, children are screaming in a way that means laughter. Over his shoulder, men shout orders. The sink is deep as he stacks plates. He scrapes off uneaten food. Twists of cabbage, hunks of clean bone, flabby strips of overripe vegetables. He soaps the dishes. Then he rinses them off with cool water. Outside, children scream; inside, men yell. Next plate. Next plate. He enjoys this. He savours the routine. The simplicity—nothing to remember. When he finishes his shift, maybe she’ll come over.

As he lifts out of sleep, the city has fallen away. Outside, the road is sun. A white clavicle cutting across the earth. In the far distance he sees hills bulging into the sky—a ribcage mid-inhale. Remembering the city takes effort: out here even the sounds are unheard. He pries open his window and the wind flattens the grass and behind the bus, a red car merges onto the road and shoots past.

The air conditioning in the car is broken so Veronica’s rolled her windows all the way down and her thighs cling to the seat. She feels better now that she’s drunk some water, and after she’s passed the bus, she takes another sip. A few kilometres back she had to pull over and crawl to the passenger door and hinge her body out of the car to vomit. She got a chunk of it on the red paint job. Eating breakfast was a mistake. She should have known that today, of all days, she can’t hold anything down.

The red car had been her brother’s. The radio doesn’t pick up signals too well so she listens to static, and as the bus behind her blurs into the heat, she clicks it off. Her headache continues, though she hasn’t had any alcohol. It must be the heat—and the long, trampling, sleepless night. She crushes the plastic water bottle.

Wind flows into the car, rustles her gym shorts just as it parses the grass by the road. Veronica ignores the trembling in her ankles. Focuses on the engine thrumming through the car, beneath her, the wind and the sun on the wheel. Her foot eases into the gas and the red car that was her brother’s goes a little faster. Outside rushes by and inside feels so light she doubts there’s gravity. And if her seatbelt wasn’t holding her down, she’d levitate and the bottle would float: the wind would fill her sweaty T-shirt, ungluing the fabric from her stomach. Inside the car, Veronica could be driving anywhere. Outside the car, somewhere, is her destination.

Last night, for the first time in years, she remembered the fire. She hadn’t forgotten, she knows, but last night she remembered. The dark carved it out and returned the smell of smoke and warmth so hot, she didn’t feel it. Her skin wasn’t hers anymore. And her brother. And the way the sky looked red when the building burned. She hasn’t lived in the city since, in those high, tight buildings. While running, and her brother somewhere behind her, she counted, counted every second so she’d know how long it took to get out. But she can’t remember what number she got to.

There’s a bus stop here, the sign slanted in the wind. Veronica takes a long, curving right. It’s not far now and she sees the house shrivelling under the sun. Straight ahead. She parks on the road, doesn’t close the windows. Nausea clambers up her throat again. She hears the cicadas. Their chirping pulses into the ground, echoes across the hairs on her arm. Toward the south, the mountains heave into the sky, but in front of her, Veronica sees only fields. The house’s walls are faded pink, flat dry tongues. Around it the grass is yellow. The roof seems too big—it sags and buckles over the walls, curtains them in shadow, in some terrible weight. It’s hot.

And then, she isn’t alone. In the side mirror, she sees one person. Two more. They must have come from the bus stop. They must have been riding the bus.

Cicadas whine, crunch the air until it feels still.

Veronica trembles as she wipes her forehead, tightens her gym shorts, and peels herself out of the car. When she closes the door, pale brown dust rises to her knees. The three people come down the road separately. Veronica waits.

Ayando is ahead of the other two. He wipes his hands against each other and struggles with the face of the woman leaning against the red car, arms crossed. He doesn’t think he knows her. But he has trouble remembering. Her lips are narrow, cracking apart in the thin wind. He wonders if he should recognize her.

For five years, it’s been like this. Trouble calling up names, appointments, tasks. The walls of Ayando’s bedroom are scaled with paper notes, phone numbers and reminders scrawled over them. He’d forget to pay his bills if it wasn’t for Marina—he’d leave everything half done. Some years ago, he tripped and fell while rushing down the fire escape. He can’t remember the date or the address but he knows where it is. He knows how the metal rungs felt under his bare feet, how they were scabbed over with dried bird shit and how he couldn’t think. Smoke, and screams—somebody was screaming.

He almost didn’t come. Part of him wishes he were still on the bench, the church glazing his shoulders with shadow. A day off—why didn’t he spend it with Marina? Why did he come? He tucks his hand into his pocket to check on the note. He should ask the woman with the red car why she’s here. And the two behind him, the kid with the runny nose and the girl in sneakers that squeak against rubbery dirt.

George stops, slips off his backpack, pulls off his sweater. It must be close to noon now. He didn’t tell his mother he was coming here. She’s at work now, he imagines, sweating in her cramped office, loosening her shoes so her feet can breathe. Thinking he’s in school. When he pulled out the newspaper, tattered from the trip in his backpack, and flattened it against the table, she sighed. The sound slumped her shoulders, made them regress into her body. We need to let this go, she said, or something. She thinks the past is buried, same as George’s father. Only his father wasn’t buried. In the end, they let fire finish what it started.

But George has come, still. He rummages through his sweater, pulling a bunched tissue out of its pocket. He sniffles again and wipes. His nose itches and he rubs it against the knob of his wrist. Yuck. A trail of snot outlining his bones. He wonders about the man in front of him, the man from the church, whose legs swing purposefully when he walks. And the person waiting by the car, and the woman behind him. Maybe they saw the real estate ad, too.

Is this a mistake? Nina thinks it might be. She was surprised when a man and the teenager climbed out of the bus after her. She is the last to arrive at the house, huddled into itself, with the dusty red car in front. The grass looks yellow and brittle. If she lay down on it, it might snap from the weight of her back. A sign peeks out of the dirt. It says, For sale.

She isn’t interested in the house. Maybe the others are, but she’s here for someone. Finally she stops, awkwardly lifting a foot and inserting a finger into her shoe, adjusts her sock. The boy sneezes and swears, digs into his backpack for a fresh tissue. The woman with the car steps up and knocks on the door so hard, the skin between her knuckles strains. Veronica tries again, hammering with her fist. But nobody is home. Maybe they missed him. Maybe that’s a relief. The sun swoops lower and Nina wants to melt into the dust.

Let’s just go in, Ayando insists. The paper in his pocket wrinkles when he moves, reminding him it’s there. For the past few years, it was on his wall. He wrote the name on it with his own hand, as soon as he could write again. The name on it owns this house. The name on it isn’t home.

When Ayando shoulders the door open, George hesitates. Trespassing is a crime, his brain says. But he came all this way. He goes in third, after the woman with the car. Inside, the windows are shuttered so it’s dusky and cool and humid. Sunlight flushes in through the open door.

Hello? Ayando calls.

Veronica shouts too, tries out the name on Ayando’s paper. 

So we’re here for the same person, Ayando thinks. 

Veronica hurries through the empty kitchen, peeks into the back rooms. Her fingers are coated with dust from touching the countertops. George stands still. Even with his clogged nose, he can smell the damp in here. He smells cigarettes and crisp, burnt grass.

Nina hovers above the doorstep. She wonders why she’s here. Because of the fire. Yes, because of the fire, but why is she here? The building across the street from her apartment burned five years ago. Long before she moved in.

Is there anyone inside? Nina says finally.

No, George tells her. His voice is strained and nasal. I don’t think he’s here.

Why did I come? Ayando kicks a chair. He’s not even here!

I don’t know. Veronica sits down, in the same chair Ayando kicked. Her eyes have adjusted and she can see the place clearly now. A large table, ramshackle cupboards. She isn’t interested in what’s inside. I shouldn’t have come.

They listen to the cicadas. Nina leans against the door. Her toes stretch against the edges of her shoes. Suddenly anguish builds up in her lungs—but the moment passes.

Wind blowing in through the door. The sun soaking into the road. And the cicadas, filling each instant. Ayando sighs. Veronica sits. George stands. Still, Nina leans against the door. The sky’s vast and full.

I might cry, Veronica says. But she throws back her head and laughs, laughs hard and loud. And soon George, too, is laughing and Ayando laughs, and Nina. They don’t know each other’s names, but who gives a fuck.

After a minute, they step out of the house. The door inches shut; heat pours into their skin. Veronica has offered to drive them all back to the city. In the last five years, she’s hardly ever been to the city, but today she’s happy to give them a lift. She is going to float again in the car, with the windows down and everything broken. But it’s still a good car.

George lingers for a bit by the door, and Nina, too. Then George strikes off toward the red car and Nina stands on the doorstep alone. She thinks about the man who lives here. She wonders whether he’ll know that someone’s been inside, and if so, if he’ll guess who they were. She thinks about how, five years ago, he lit a cigarette and left it on the bed and went out. How five years ago, it was a summer night and he started a fire. How they never tore the building down and she sees it every morning when she wakes up. When she goes home, its black skeleton will be there like always and the women will still be peeling potatoes downstairs. The café will still be open and people will be flooding the streets, leaving work. The full day of sunlight will have engorged the city so the buildings will rub their shoulders against each other. The city—it doesn’t care and yet it does, more than any of them.

How hard would it be, she says, to start a fire?

The house is so small, it would burn in seconds. She pictures the flames licking the sky, and the smoke grinding down the horizon. But the wind has picked up again and the cicadas are loud; no one has heard her.

Vera Hadzic (she/her) is a writer from Ottawa, Ontario. Recently, her work has appeared in Hexagon Magazine, Idle Ink, Okay Donkey Magazine, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter @HadzicVera or through her website, www.verahadzic.com.

Image by Simon Hurry @bullterriere