The violent blue of the Florida Chicken sign woke Farhan up at three a.m.—an hour and a half before his alarm went off. For the past three months, a bowling chicken in blue shorts with a purple question mark above its head had shaken him from sleep. He imagined that the chicken rose with the same nightmare as his, and that they both wondered why Farhan stayed in this country despite the warnings to leave.

Half mile before I reach the store, I see a runner on the sidewalk. She’s wearing a white top and navy blue shorts.  It is within her powers, I’m sure, to slow traffic approaching her from behind.  A minute later, getting out of my car, I see her again, running through the store parking lot, which seems odd. Maybe there’s sidewalk repair going on; she’s taken an alternate route. I pause as she runs by, then pause a few seconds more. 

In his dreams he flew in a blue sky, words swirling around him. He’d pass a building and the words would be illuminated with the vocabulary of the city. Skyscraper, ledge, birds, custody, deposition, and toothpaste were all translated from Urdu into English. Phrases like “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” swam into him. The dream made his job easier because he knew what the customers at the drugstore were talking about: the twin towers falling, the toothpaste on sale, or the birds shitting on their cars. But last night a wind had scattered the language and torn him apart, causing him to wake up in a cold sweat. 

When Aaron finishes, he rolls off of me and goes into the other room and grabs a shaving kit out of his backpack and disappears into the bathroom. When he comes out he’s different. His eyes are glazed over and docile. It seems like if I reached out and touched him he would break. He leans in and pecks me on the cheek, grabs the weed off the dresser, and leaves. 

Aaron drives for Radio Cab and doesn’t get off work until late. He always says he’s going to take me star gazing out by the airport, but he never does. We always do the same thing: I wander off somewhere until the sun’s about to come up, and he picks me up and takes me to my apartment and we sit around and drink beers and smoke and I let him fuck me. Stars don’t impress me, anyway.

I often wondered what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t died. In fact, for some reason, I had been thinking about that a lot on the flight from Amsterdam that morning. Part of the reason I had felt so queasy. Longing for a memory that had never been. 

The night swimmers swim close to the shore. On occasion, one of them swims farther out, out of sight of the others. This is when I rise up from the sand at the bottom of the sea. 

I am a robot. I live in the sea. My skin is metal yellow, though the seaweed makes this difficult to see. It covers me.

"I heard Tanner’s back in town,” Dad says while setting the table. “Do you want to invite him over for dinner tonight?”

We threw eggs—that was our thing. Three years ago, in the tenth grade, I somehow convinced Tanner’s bus driver I was also on the bus route just so I could get dropped off at his house. We’d lounge around his living room, eating Pizza Rolls and not doing homework. Mrs. Wheeler would always come home from work an hour later, complain about our smelly feet, but would still call him her favorite son. She said I was a close second.