In the low sun, a man’s face glows green through the cheap security camera, staring into space like an idiot while he fills his gas tank, kids strapped down in the back seat, each on their own Nintendo DS. He pays at the pump while another guy inside buys a quart of something (windshield-wiper fluid or motor oil maybe) and palms a pack of gum at the checkout. Most people who steal don’t really need to, and people who don’t need to steal never get caught. A lady in a fur coat fills up a shopping cart in one of those warehouse-size liquor stores. The parking lot camera shows her tipping the kid who had been stocking the shelves a few minutes earlier for loading her bags into a car with out-of-state plates.

Weird thoughts keep popping into my head, so fast I can’t keep track of them or try to figure out what they mean. I go out through the kitchen door onto what’s left of the backyard and turn away from the water, shiny and black like an oil slick without the rainbow. I lie on my back and look at the show-off spread of clouds. I count the stars in a slow, steady rhythm. My breathing falls in line with my counting, and I go on like this until it’s too beautiful and the number’s too big for me to be able to think anything in particular.

Tonight’s a bit of a nothing moon. Not a half or a sliver. Not full or new, not really, really big or orange-tinted. There are no wicked-witch clouds shuffling across it. It’s just a moon that was full a few days ago. The black water slaps its side against the cliffs. I give my mind over to the waves that never tire of the same old dance moves. The cliff and the ocean, a mosh pit of two.

When my skin cools off and goose bumps start to form under the dried sweat I head back inside. The paper’s still open on the couch. Dead black men, white-collar criminals getting off with a fine, a drone attack incinerates a wedding, an op-ed piece declaring an end to the age of “isms.” Goodbye racism, sexism, feminism; the world is all grown up and sooo over it! I close the newspaper and flip through the channels until I find a gentle documentary about religious cults in Japan, settle in, tuck my feet under my legs, and pull the blanket off the back of the couch over my shoulders, more for comfort than warmth.