A little while later, they spent some time in the attic apartment of a young woman writing a book. She had sheets of butcher paper taped on the walls of the cramped room. Using a Flair pen, she wrote her lines around herself and became like a fly in a spider’s web.

“Her name is Shiela Tobac,” said Melody, as the woman sat at a small desk only two feet away from them, bobbing her head as she wrote longhand in a journal dedicated to notes about her massive story. She wore a green T-shirt and a green cardigan sweater, shorts, sneakers with thick yellow soles, and white basketball socks. Her movements around the room bordered on the athletic. Even when she stood reading from some section of the wall, she bounced on her toes, her long red hair swaying wildly.

“She looks like a hard worker,” said Owen. “I mean she’s up and she’s down and traveling from one part of the room and its chapter to another corner to, I guess, check the continuity?”

“She’s crossed the line between genius and insanity,” said Melody.

“Heading in which direction?”

“Well, I come here now and then and try to find my way back into her story.”

“What’s it about?” he asked as the busy Shiela Tobac passed through them on the way to a distant chapter.

“Too much to get into,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to start telling you about it.”

“I think she’s amazing, living inside her creation,” said Owen. By then, they were out on the rooftop. They stood at the edge and Owen waited for Melody to choose a way to go. Eventually, she leaped across the side yard and driveway below and landed on the roof next door. From there, she leaped again, high and at the peak of ascent almost weightless, jump after jump, all the way down the street. Ten houses in a row. He followed her, with a few stumbles. The last of those mishaps saw him trip and fall headfirst through the roof, through the second floor, to the living room of an abandoned house.

He landed in the middle of a candlelit scene. One man was sitting in a chair in a corner that the light could almost but not quite reach, his face and much of his body obscured. Two young men, just visible in the glow, were sitting in chairs facing the first man in the shadows. They gave him a satchel of money and he produced a plastic bag of large, live cicadas. The two traders immediately dug into their plastic bags, pulled out squirming specimens, and shoved them into their mouths. As they chewed, laughter spilled out of the darkness, and Owen leaped all the way to the roof.