Noir

The radio won’t stop calling. I can hear it through the walls of a place that’s a motel and a repair shop and something else entirely—a space where work happens on things that shouldn’t be worked on. The transmission crackles: Help, no one can help. Then silence. Then it crackles again with a question nobody asked, an answer to something I haven’t said yet. I’m standing in a parking lot that smells like rust and rain and the particular loneliness of 3 a.m. The asphalt is slick. My feet know where they’re going but I’m not the one walking. Or I am, but I’m also watching from somewhere above, and the distance between those two things is exactly the distance between knowing something and knowing you know it. ...