Janie writes her way through days, noting the shirtless man packing leaves into a paper bag, the duck-footed boy running down along the uneven grass by the highway, the disintegrating woman shouting through toothless gums, the business thinny whose dress and heels match her Mini...   not so much as fellow humans, but as a characters entering a story she seems never to be able to stop telling and never to be able to write down.

The man's chest hair is unevenly matted, and the tool he is using doesn't work.  The first is the result, no doubt, of childhood scarring,  the second simply disregard. This is why he is no longer married, and also why his job has been reduced to part-time, leaving him free on this Friday late morning to plod around in a garden the size of a toaster.  If Janie is the disintegrating woman, he is the duck-footed boy going nowhere at a harried pace. She does not greet him.  Does not nod.

Mirthless is this state of being - this half awake, half written posture she assumes in the world. She only half-fools the ones who think she is present, and regrets this the way she regrets dishes in the sink in the morning - the hardened fat on the cutting board, the smear of butter on the counter - things real and vaguely treacherous when unattended.  She wakes up to recrimination and falls asleep when the list of disappointed humans has stretched to include the woman who had not yet reached the sidewalk when Janie turned left onto Broadview.

Janie lives in this distended state, bloated by dreams of getting it down, stretched thin by disappointment. She isn't here. And chances are nobody will ever know.