I came to exhausted. My limbs ached, the way they had when I’d had the flu last year. The throbbing in my head from the blow lingered, and I had to blink a few times before the street around me came back into focus. Each step toward home felt heavy, full of effort. Her name was in the back of my throat, but I didn’t want to say it, to match up what I knew with the thing I had been afraid of.

The vision was about Julie. Julie Zale. The tooth, Victoria’s crying child. I couldn’t deny it anymore. There was something evil and ugly at work behind these visions. And now someone had gotten to Julie Zale, too. I texted Lily. Please, can we meet?

LUIS

ON HIS DAY OFF, HE buys food for the cats, and in the afternoon he carries three plastic bags of cans to the bulkhead. When he slips beneath the boardwalk, he takes a moment to relish the shade, the sand that has cooled underneath the planks. To his left, the pier juts out into the sea and a pair of men are talking, one of them leaning against a piling. Luis pays them no mind and stoops to open the first can. The cats crowd around him, curl around his feet. He’s only opened six of the twenty cans when he feels a tap on the shoulder. One of the men from the pier, who jerks his thumb over his shoulder. Get out of here.

Luis points to the bag of cans, to the cats that have only just crept across the beach and who are still hungry. The man shakes his head, and when Luis turns to open another can, the man grips his shoulder and spins him around. This time, he’s raised his shirt to reveal a black gun nestled against his skin. The second man joins him and Luis knows to raise his hands in the air and surrender—all he ever does anymore. On his way back he passes the shop with the golden eye in the window, and when the girl with the red hair looks up at him he scurries away.

Instead of going back to the boardinghouse—its musty carpets, the dim rooms—he makes his way to the lot where his old house was. Now it’s just another gap where weeds have grown up through the dust and people have tossed their empty beer cans. He’s furious that people are so cruel, so indifferent, that they permit the rot he notices at every corner. He stalks away, grinding his teeth, stopping to kick signposts, throwing loose cans and making them bounce off fences and walls. He shoves his hands in his pockets and feels the jingle of his change from the pizza joint, the matchbook he slid from the counter as the man warmed his slices in the oven.