There should have been chaos in the streets. The town should have been engulfed in flames.

It was cold. Freezing. I’d hardly been outside the week before, and in that time, the seasons had changed; it was only the end of September but the maples were already going yellow and orange and crimson, the earliest sacrificial leaves bunched at the side of the road, making way for the inevitable first snowfall of the year. Due any day. Fall didn’t last long here. Since we were so close to Lake Erie, any cold air that arrived just ricocheted off the bank and shot straight at us. You could already smell winter: frozen iron and fireplace smoke and car exhaust. On the long stretches of empty road, I’d ride with one hand clutching the handlebar, the other lapping up heat from my breath. I had never liked the cold, but today, it made me especially angry. I wanted to bite back at it.

I could just leave, I realized, road stretching ahead of me like an invitation. Pedal and pedal until my legs screamed, until I forgot how to pedal. But where would I go? California? Dad had always wanted to take me so I could see the giant redwoods. (‘You wouldn’t believe how small they make you feel, Syd!’ I hadn’t understood why that was something that excited him.) But we’d never got the chance to go. We’d wanted to go to Yosemite the following spring, maybe. Obviously that wasn’t on the cards any more. But I could’ve gone now. Lived in the forest. Hollowed out a redwood, sat still for days and weeks and months, waited for nature to reclaim my body. Maybe I’d have felt something with branches curling through my guts.

Two hours of aimless wandering had passed, and the cold had become entirely unbearable. I turned towards home – but I had to pass the cemetery anyway.

Twelve graves across, four rows down.

Even if I hadn’t counted, the grave wasn’t hard to find; his was the freshest, the dirt powdered with a thin layer of ice crystals. This place felt more like home than home did. It definitely hadn’t the day before, with the mourners and the whispers and the gawking, but now, with just him and me, I felt the urge to scoop out a me-shaped hole, plant myself like a seed.

But I would have had to move the roses first.

Three of them in the bunch – white, like the sort Dad kept in his office. These were new. The flowers we’d left yesterday were clustered round the headstone, stiff with frost, but these were untouched. They must have been put there that morning. Had Mom come? She couldn’t have – I would have heard her leave.

This unexpected thing tripped my brain, made me aware of the other unexpected things that I must have filed away as dreams. That text.