The sound of water, falling, in the distance, not the constancy of rainfall, not the singular trickle of a faucet or the focused plash of a fountain, but many differing streams and sources, here and there and there, the varying rhythms falling in and out of phase with each other, and their echoes, and now and then a sudden sputtering gout or exuberant overflow. Jo opens her eyes.

The light’s brighter, whitely sifted from fluorescents bolted to green concrete beams along with oh so many pipes, black lengths of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene criss-crossing clean white polyvinyl chloride interspersed with much more slender tubes of gleam-nicked steel, and all of them every one leaking from joints and elbows, caps and seams, water falling from all that plumbing to spang and thump and plack and tock the roofs and hoods, the windshield glass of cars that have been parked in spottily ordered rows on a concrete floor awash with troubled dimpled spattered water, with water stretched in placid sheets, with rippled runnels gurgling down choked and sucking drains, water lapping over her bare feet, over the gleaming pistol dropped to the concrete before her, submerged.

“Ahuh,” she says, she sobs, slosh-stepping back, “ah, aheh,” arms wrapped about her oversized sweater, “Ys,” she’s saying, “Ysabel!” slap and spatter, “Ysabel!” turning about and around again, stilling, stalling, water-slash stop. He’s stood there, at the far end in the moonlight slanting through the open garage door, not as bright as the fluorescents but limning him with a pearly sheen, for all that everything about him’s grey, his trousers a roughly woven shade of ash, his loosely rumpled shirt the speckled hue of gravel, his lugubrious expression the color of cold oatmeal.

“John,” she says, pitched to carry over the drip and tinkle.

“Joliet,” he says, reverberantly. “You’ve changed your hair.”

“What is this,” she says, headed toward him. “Is it all melting?”

He looks, up, about, “No,” he says, a considering shake of his head, “no. This, this is just, shoddy construction.”

“Where are we?”

He shrugs expressively. “I, am here. You? Are, where you were.”

She pulls up short, a couple-three car trunks between them, water slopping her ankles, her shivering grip about herself tightening. “This, isn’t the warehouse,” she says. “I didn’t, unless this is, more, Moody bullshit,” and at that, he moves to close the distance between them, slurp and plop about his grey shoes wetly blackening, “Do not,” he says, “be so quick with that name, here and now. This is, perhaps,” a sweep of an arm, taking in the garage about them, “what might have become of that warehouse, had it burned to the ground some years ago. If your Chatelaine’s father had not completed his purchase, or made a better go, of the deal he’d had in mind.”

“If he hadn’t been cut down by Orlando,” she says.

“You’re shivering cold. Let’s get you in, out of this,” looking up, about, “rain,” he says. Looking back, over his shoulder, the open door, the moonlight. “There must be a shop close by with something suitable. Once more, it seems,” turning back to her, with something like a smile, “I’m called upon to see you outfitted.”

“Well,” she says, “if you’d maybe call first.” Shivering enough now to chatter her teeth. Her one hand still closed, over the top of her breast. “Give a girl some notice.”

A small bird, perched on the roof-rack of a low-slung, slope-hooded car, looking here there there, sharp black eye, wicked beak, head of it a pale grey cape shading to white at the throat, the body a canary yellow almost green in this uncertain light, there, then gone, a furor of wings darted over the sidewalk between steel and glass and a row of young trees freshly planted, all of a scrawny size, and those wings settle, and hold, a swoop of a glide over a yawning garage entrance, PARKING, say the steel-rimmed letters above it, past that turning climbing over clambering steps and concrete bleachers that lead up to a narrow alley and a couple-few more of those young trees lost in the steepening shadows of a falling night, or a breaking day. Wings flutter to dip sharply, rear up, alight, of a sudden, atop a demure blue sandwich board, Goat Blocks, it says, Leasing Office, and an arrow pointing. Looking there, there, up, over, a storefront tucked away here in this narrow crook of an alley, Alouyiscious, maybe, says the swirlingly calligraphed sign over the open door. Clearance Sale, says the hastily lettered cardboard sign in the window. Everything Must Go.

A look, away, again, and instantly the bird’s not there, a rattle of wings, whip of air through that opened doorway into the unlit shop to find the edge of a rough grey hand and stop as if it had always been folded, tiny, there, up, out, there. “No, no, an actual, like, flower,” Jo’s saying, “grown up out of the, this, this thing, like it was a seed,” from somewhere unseen, that curtained alcove, maybe, “looped, like, around my neck? This big fucking thing, always in the way, it was, like, a poppy? But, like. Pink.”

Grey John lifts his hand, mindful of the bird’s wariness, up and up until it’s there by his listening ear.

“Anyway. She said, the, the wizard, Upchurch, said, it’s not a seed. That there wouldn’t be a flower. I mean, there was, but, that was, like, a dream? And I mean, just now, in what Moody, him, he, tried to, fuck me up with, I, it was, a feather, John, that came out of it. I mean, is it an egg? Is that what it is?”

The bird leaps away as that curtain’s yanked open with a scrape of rings, and Jo steps out in a dull red running jacket, zipping it up to her chin. “What happens when it hatches?” she says.

He turns his grey head back from the palely open doorway to her in those uncertain shadows, red and black and white by other clothing racked in mistily pastel gradients. “Quicksmoke,” he says, “does not hatch. It makes a shell, of scales, for itself, of what it takes from the world, that it might securely slumber, till it might safely wake.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, “I think it’s getting restless,” sitting herself on the low rim of steps about the little open foyer. In her hand a pair of long thick woolen booties, heavy socks with papery leather soles, that she sets to pulling on. “No shoes?” he says, frowning.

“I’m not wearing any of those,” she says, pointing back to a low table decorously littered with slenderly spike-heeled pumps and insubstantial sandals. “I swear, everything in here’s either lululemon knock-offs or, I don’t know. Trophy wife goes to the bank. I think I know why they’re going out of business. Okay,” sitting back, hands braced on the floor behind her, “where am I going.”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“John,” she says, sitting up. The face of him looking back, stonily impassive. “Then,” she says, “how do I get back.”

“You never left,” he says, and steps toward the open door.

“I never,” she says, and then, “I need to, John! I need to, you said. All this,” a sweep of her arm, taking it all in, shop and clothing, shoes, the doorway, the alley beyond, but somehow also steel and glass, and brick, and pipes, and falling water, “it’s what it could’ve, should have been. I need to get back to what it was, is, to what it is. How. How do I get back, to, to,” and as she trails away, he half-turns, on the threshold, looking back to her. “How have you ever made it back?” he says.

She blinks. “Jesus, John,” she whispers.

“It is given to you to see me but once more,” he says. “It is my fondest hope,” turning away, but not before that grey face is lighted by a smile, “that when that time does come, I shall see you, both, together.”

And out he steps, into the alley. Up she springs and out, after him, into the burgeoning sunlight, “John!” she calls, but stumbles headlong reaching managing barely not to fall over a tummock twisting turned about upright again her footing not on brick or concrete but on grass, lushly rumpled grass, a great long vacant block of it tilted from the far high end yonder down and down, past a somnolent backhoe drooped there, struck by the rising sun, past the parking lot over across that street, Zipcars Live Here, say green signs hung from the cyclone fence, past the low olive warehouse across the street to the other side, Gatto and Sons, it says, over the bay doors, Wholesale Produce, down and gentling down past where she’s stood to the low end of the block below, the hulking workshop across the short street there, Creative Woodworking NW, says the sign over the door. Down there, a corner of the lot’s been cordoned off, a low and temporary fence of wooden stakes upholding sheets of startling orange plastic netting about a close-cropped patch of grass. A couple haphazard structures within, makeshift sheds, waist-high at most, bridged by a wide bowed plank, and an erratic causeway of tree-trunk segments set on end about them.

Jo makes her way toward it all, carefully through the grass in those heavy woolen booties. Movement within one of those sheds, crunch of straw, a sleepy bleat. She could easily step over that low orange fence, but sits herself before it in the grass, and, as the light grows and warms, watches the goats, a couple of billies, a half-dozen nannies, three little kids all stepping from their hutches, chewing their breakfasts, greeting the day, one after another leaping onto those tree-trunks, and the clattering clack of their hooves.

Her eyes close.

The arc of the rising sun clears the treetops off to the left there.

She doesn’t look up or around at the soft footstep behind her, the wisp of gauze over grass. She doesn’t open her eyes to look to the hand, laid gently on her shoulder. Her mouth sets, holding something back. She lifts her own hand, to reach for those fingers there, unseen, and take them with her own, and squeeze.