Some doing, is all it takes. A little dying, a diet of lying, and wordless abandon to the strands of thin light playing against the glass. Medicine to begin and end another one night sanguine stand in the sunkissed sand. Manual time, borrowed from a terribly broken watch. A certain number of steps and the grand secret of seductive grief.

Then the process complexifies and tends to vary, night-to-night. Last night, it was a sort of retrocausally prophetic stage play, my own shadow portraying young death himself. The day prior had been deliberately drenched in whiskey, too much, but enough to mine a well-founded fear and its accompanying abject terror. I was still in the late-stage dry blitz, slightly dizzy, and made much worse with my newly minted nightmare laid bare. Then the light ceased dancing and the room ceased to be.

A moment of total black.

A world assembled itself from the corners.

Voices. Screams. Laughter. Sobbing.

“There you are,” you said.

There you were.

You were standing on the doorstep of a storefront with green neon signs, burning through the thick veil of impossibly late night. With the falling snow, the eerie glow of indecipherable language drifted down, lightly dyeing the white sheet draped over the ground below.

Lining the sidewalk in either direction was shop after similar shop, each one radiant with a different color, each more shrouded than the last.

Dead center of them all, you were waiting for me.

You stepped down and extended your left hand. I took it in my right and we walked.

The air between flurries was cigarette smoke and cotton candy.

In the storefront windows, your reflection was white. Mine couldn’t be seen.

Cigarettes, cotton candy, now frying sausage and onions. I couldn’t find the feeling, so I spoke.

“Fair in town?”

A look.

“Miss that,” you said.

You drew a deep breath.

“Yeah,” you said, “I guess it must be.”

A smile.

“Now I feel like talking,” you said, handing me a foggy purple, then dull gold, now pale blue cigarette, a haloed cherry already burning bright. “Tell me something.”

Pale blue, then faded scarlet, now dusky amber snow fell on and on.

“I found a restaurant,” I began, “which seemed to never end. The walls were tiled in glossy ruby red. The floor was glossy checkerboard. The ceiling was low, and glossy black. Booths, tables, long glass displays for pastries, donuts, muffins, cupcakes. The sound of sizzling, kitchen din, dinner chatter, celebration. Balloons bounced and floated here and there. Smiling faces in the shade of smoking trays moved expertly through traffic. Pinball machines, claw machines, ticket machines, vending machines, and arcade cabinets, all ringing and blinking brightly in narrow nooks and curtained coves. … ”

You turned us toward a door engulfed in a blaze of pink neon. It appeared to be slightly brighter than the others.

On the doorstep, you let go of my hand, reaching into your coat’s left pocket and removing a ring with two keys, before retaking it. With your right hand, you turned the door knob and pushed it open. Lilac light grazed the deep pitch just beyond the threshold.

I followed you inside and you closed the door.

Total black once more.

“It is behind you,” you said.

I turned, placing my left hand on the wall we’d just walked through, blindly feeling, finding, flipping the switch.

Dots of soft silver light appeared in the corners of the vantablack ceiling and floor, extending in lines to their right and left, tracing the top and bottom of each wall, converging on the one just in front of us before finally outlining an elevator door.

“solesen,” you said.

A single line of light bisected the door, top to bottom, then split into two, moving left and right. The small silver rays entered the darkness ahead of us, coming to rest in the corners of the car.

We stepped inside. As the door closed, you pressed two small silver circles on the wall.

Gently, we moved through the still falling snow.