A small wind twitches the feathers of the honeylocust outside my window. The morning is dark, as if rain lurks in the clouds, though the forecast claims otherwise. Like you, I am melancholy about Texas and Louisiana, drowning in those torrents rushing down and down and down from a chaotic sky; and, perhaps like you, I've been thinking about those scenarios in which nightmares become fact: when the storm does destroy your home, the man in the van does kidnap your child, the speeding car does kill your lover . . . how we may take precautions, avoid risk, sink into existential dread, yet we cannot prepare ourselves for fate.

A small wind twitches the feathers of the honeylocust outside my window. A black-haired youth, shoulders slumped, strides down the sidewalk and out of sight. A tiny dog sits patiently as his owner checks her phone. The minutiae, the unimportant moments, gather and dissipate. We live and die in our cloak of forgetting. Yet the red bicycle is still chained to the post, as it has been for the past week. What happened to its rider? Who possesses the key?