Six of eight purple Fireworks Flowers along the brick sidewalk had burst. The other two were buds. The stems were parallel approximately, reminiscent of the sculpture at the bus stop on Frankford. I was temporarily awake thanks to a cold peppermint tea. Who would you say this to, because you certainly wouldn’t say it to me.

How about this. There’s a rug store named Minimal Chaos. When I hear the name I begin working out how much chaos this place is known for. On the one hand, I think, Minimal. So, there’s a small amount of chaos, not a lot, right? On the other hand, it’s a rug store, so they didn’t even have to bring it up. So the fact that they did means there must be a greater than average amount of chaos when compared with other rug stores. Right? It’s a rug store characterized by a minimal, and yet oddly non-zero, amount of chaos. Yeah that’s the sort of thing you would tell me about.

What if the categories are more simple. Like, tops, bottoms, one-pieces. Underthings, outerwear, loungewear. What if I use photographs. What if I cut the list apart so I can physically rearrange it. What if it’s paper dolls and outfits with paper tabs. What if there’s a chart, with information represented vertically, horizontally, and by color coding. What if I get a label maker. What if I learn calligraphy.

What if you tell me a story? What do you want to know? What happens at the fair? Kid runs away from their family. Why? I don’t know. Oh it’s going to be a present-tense situation? Yeah. Actually, great idea, yes. And I know it gets cold later, but starts out warm. I know the parking lot is big and grassy. I scouted a location for it the other day, it’s perfect. It’s not grassy in the same way but the pavement is busted up and it’s overgrown. Is this a true story? No. He finds out it’s not his family. And he’s not sure where they’re going when they leave here. He must have very much not wanted to get into that car. He’s fifteen, being on his own is very scary, almost like being afraid of the dark again. There’s going to be an adult who helps him out. But let’s give him a few nights and days on his own before they meet up. This is a story about that window of time. The fair has food and jobs. It’s a great place to run away. A lot of temporary, unsecured shelters.

Plus it’s a place you never want to go home from. Like the hospital. The baby likes the beeping and the lights and the blankets at the hospital. She likes the window blinds for cutting the light of the city into such thin strips and laying it so parallel. She likes the shine on the floors. She loves the voices. At least, she loves the voices in the daytime, of nurses and visitors and the cheerful sick. She likes the cooing of the other babies, but the other voices in the baby wing are not so nice, some of them. Even the nice ones are frightening. The nice ones are sad and the others are angry. The first night, she knows that somehow. The next night, it’s all just sound, but the uneasiness remains. From the second night on, she feels like she’s forgetting something.

The boy forgot his jacket. That’s what they call it on TV when a kid doesn’t have a jacket. Forgot it. It’s summer so he wouldn’t need it if he wasn’t going to be still outside at dawn, but he will be.

I don’t even know that this is the night you are born. Most of the great reveals in history are not noticed by anyone. I’m staying up late watching TV because tomorrow night there might not be any. I haven’t made up my mind but I feel like I’m not coming home.

Do they look for him? I mean, I would think so. Any chance the baby gets left at the hospital? No. She’s going home. Do they wonder why he ran away? Sure. Do they ask? That’s a good question. It seems obvious. What kind of people wouldn’t?

They let me take a Chemistry class last year. I wanted to be in there because when I sat at the table in the back corner of the room next to the emergency exit door, I could hear something. Not a voice but something that other people couldn’t hear so I guess technically it was in my imagination, but I’m not sure. It was the sound of the stars. And it was like a faint, unpunctuated ringing. Like jingling but more uniform, less syllabic. I liked it.

And he can hear that again at the fair?! Shhhhh. Maybe.

What if you lived in a hot hotel room and you were eight months pregnant and you lived with your boyfriend in a small town and then your boyfriend got picked up by the police for questioning regarding a homicide. But he had an airtight alibi and not much information and they let him go right away. But he felt pretty bad to find out about the deceased person. He had thought of them fondly. But I mean, you would still be more focused on getting some air-conditioning. They said friends and family said she lit up every room she walked into, but I mean, most people do. Usually the light switch is right near the doorway.

Who do you think helps the boy at the fair? Is that person part of the story? For instance, this pregnant couple in the hotel room with no air-conditioning, with the deceased acquaintance, are they involved with the boy? With the boy’s family? Will their baby turn out to be the baby at the hospital? You told me an adult helps the boy at the fair. Who do you think that is? Do you think it could have been the Baxters, or one of them, or somebody associated with the Baxters? I don’t know, I mean there are other adults in life besides the Baxters, or so I’ve heard.

Emerald and Foxrose Baxter used to be Emerald Baxter and Fox Rose. That was so long ago they are like legends. Like it’s two completely different people than the ones everyone knows now. Or like it’s your grandparents, who you’ve only seen photos of. Everybody knows Emerald and Foxrose, but everyone else is so much younger than they are that their earlier lives seem like part of a different era. Nobody who is alive now could have been alive then, but Fox and Emerald were. Nobody else had any suspicion that they themselves would ever become as old as the current version of Emerald and Foxrose. They were an anomaly. Two people from the previous lifetime who had somehow stayed behind when the rest of their age had died out, who were still here when the newcomers arrived, and who had become accepted into the present day as if their existence were not impossible. People were glad to have them around. People thought of them generously, as Something We May Not Understand. There hadn’t been anything like that in so long.

It’s natural to think the Baxters are involved in anything we don’t quite understand. And of course, you would want the boy at the fair to be taken in by them. But would he risk associating with someone with a high profile, given that he was on the run? I just don’t see that. A scared kid might associate with anyone who was kind to him. I guess. But I don’t know if this is all that scared of a kid.

Who are the people in the hotel room? I don’t know, but it’s summer and they are expecting their baby in a month. The fair takes place the first week of September. I think the baby is in the hospital when the boy is running away from home. So that is the same baby? Yeah I think so. I think that’s her.

The thing about a city that makes it work is that it took a long time to get that way. Like Philadelphia, for example, somebody planned it out, right? But when you look out your window today, William Penn didn’t design the house you see across the street. And if he tried, he wouldn’t know how to connect the gutter’s downspouts to the pipes running their effluence into the present-day storm drain system. Once upon a time, the implementation of that system was planned and carried out in budget meetings and council votes. Once upon a time, somebody picked out the color of the rain gutters to complement the palette from the concept drawings of the mixed-use development where the apartment house stands. There used to be a different house standing there. One day, somebody moved out of it. One day, somebody tore it down. For years, kids played in the empty lot where it used to be. Just before five p.m. on the day before a meeting, somebody finalized the concept drawings of the development that would be built on that block. We don’t even know those people. We don’t know what month their babies were born, or whether they spent any time homeless as a teen. They didn’t really plan to grow up to pinpoint the exact location of a downspout, but somebody had to. Somebody went to art school. Somebody went to the police academy. Somebody majored in biology. They had reasons myriad and unrelated. Sometimes you don’t know where things go.

Google search history: Name of pipe that carries rain gutter runoff underground, what is a trough drain, what is a trench drain, what is a downspout, what is a standpipe, does a downspout on a house rain gutter connect to a standpipe, what connects the downspout to the underground drain, effluence definition, what kind of storm water system does philadelphia have. And then there is the YouTube tab and then there are several tabs that seem to have been opened by someone in a different session: When did baz luhrman’s romeo & juliet come out, episode of seinfeld where elaine’s boyfriend has same name as a serial killer, when did seinfeld episode the masseuse air, simpsons coincidences.

There’s a big sculpture that I look at out my window. It’s a short box sitting on top of a very tall rectangle. People come out of the box and wander around on top of the rectangle with drinks in their hands and lean on the railing at night. In the daylight the whole shape and each part of the shape are stacked very still up against the sky, which in this case is kind of an underwater blue. The sculpture is impressive from here because it’s looking incredibly huge relative to the largest possible backdrop imaginable. It creates a reassuring effect in the viewer. Meanwhile, the sun is marking down shadows on the intersection with a heavy hand. Stop signs, power lines, residential trees. Next to the Edificio sculpture there is a gap and then begins a row of connected houses running four homes to the north, then another grassy alleyway and the side of an apartment building that faces on the intersecting Avenue. It is out of the side door of that apartment building that the paramedics this past January carried a young woman screaming that she was sorry and loaded her into an ambulance and flashed away into the first hours of the year. Other than that, mostly what we hear out there are fender benders from when people driving on the cross street thought oncoming traffic had a stop sign too but it doesn’t. We tell them, out the window, but quietly and they don’t hear us. And other than that, the neighbor works on his car night after night and talks on speaker phone with various people who have grievances with which he sympathizes. Then he covers the car with a tarp and leaves town for a week. Sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights we hear people who drove this far north of the bar they were looking for to find parking. Then we hear them much later in the evening returning, slurring, chattering, claiming that if something something they would’ve brought their coat.

After the fairway closes. The lights on the still rides are still on. The food stalls are still serving. Paper fry baskets and hot cups warm people’s hands as the night cools. People walk to their cars, where their jackets are. The house is fifteen miles from the park. The park is brightly lit, the house will be dark. The food stalls are still serving fries and burgers and coffee and soft drinks. At the house, I will be hungry. I have money. But now we’re all walking together toward the parking lot. Soon we will be outside the gates. That’s when I slip away. At first it feels like a small thing. Because I just stopped walking so I could have simply started again. I might have stopped to tie my shoe. I could have caught up unnoticed and had a story about the time I almost slipped away. But this is different. It’s hours later and I’m cold. I finished my burger and fries hours ago and had two cups of coffee before the vendors closed. Now what?