A man stands in a hallway looking at a photograph of an Edward Gorey drawing. He senses a presence in the air but he cannot see it. He feels a soft tendril floating beside him but he cannot touch it. He hears the muted glow of a television coming from the parlor room, but he cannot for the life of him imagine who could be watching the images at this hour.

A pin drops.

They said “Hey, hey, hey”
I said, “Wait, wait, wait.”
There’s no reason
We
Must stay
In this
World
Of Grey

A boy sits on the cold marble pew in the back row of a steel-framed chapel. The people around him are murmuring without parting their lips. He can see the unison words drifting upwards towards the concrete roof, but he can’t quite decipher what they’re saying. The small misaligned fricatives pop in disunion like distant firecrackers, turning the holy into human. These small sounds and sighs bounce turbulently off of the slate walls rolling towards the boy’s ears like a gathering thunderstorm.

The university student lays on his bed in the fetid mess of the night before. Crusts, crumbs and other discarded objects float with him in the disarray. His unblinking eyes stare upward looking past the ceiling fan, through the drywall and into the asbestos filled crawlspace above him. An album spins slowly in the corner, drone music spiraling ever downward, drilling deeper and duller with each revolution.

A woman sits at the foot of her bed staring at a blank computer screen. From a distance, she vaguely senses that her feet are cold, but the thought doesn’t seem make it from her brain to her hand to her slippers which lay just a few feet away. Slowly turning her head to look outside, the white horizonless sky meets her gaze with a stare as blank as the computer in front of her.

Fourteen feet up a body is leveraging itself through the picture window and over the cast-iron railing. The sound it makes passing the woman’s apartment is the first thing to break the silence in weeks