Then he died. She usually used this time to finish up the paperwork, get the ticket ready. She did nothing. She clutched the slip of paper in her hand. He wasn’t dead anymore.

“I’m sorry. Your ticket.”

“There’s no need,” he said, still possibly smiling. She couldn’t get a good enough look at his face to tell.

“No, your ticket. There is a way these things are done.” She scrawled out a ticket, with the information tickets always had. A random number (12,739), the quality of light at time of transaction (“fine”), the general feeling of the weather outside (“looming”), her current thoughts on the future (“looming, but fine”), and a quick sketch of what she thought hearts should look like, instead of the pulsing lumps of straw and clay that grow, cancer-like, into our chests when we turn nine years old.

He took the ticket as she thrust it at him, and then, thanking her, turned to leave.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“KING CITY,” said the paper.

“Good-bye,” waved the man, saying nothing.

“Wait,” she said, “you never told me your name.”

“Oh, you’re right,” he said, hand on door. “My name is Elliott. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

The door swung open and shut. Jackie held the slip of paper in her hand, unsure for the first time in however long her life had been what to do next. She felt that her routine, unbroken for decades, had been disrupted, that something had gone differently. But she also had no idea why she felt that. It was just a slip of paper, just clutched in her hand, just that.

She finished her paperwork; on the line that said “pawned by,” she stopped. She could not remember his name. She couldn’t even remember his face. She looked down at the piece of paper. “KING CITY.” She looked up to get a glimpse of him out the window, just to jostle her stuck memory.

From the counter, she could see the man in the tan jacket outside. He was running out to the desert. She could just barely see him at at the edge of the parking lot’s radius of light. His arms were swinging wildly, his suitcase swinging along. His legs were flailing, great puffs of sand kicked up behind him, his head thrown back, sweat visible running down his neck even from where she sat. The kind of run that was from something and not toward. Then he left the faint edge of the light and was gone.

2

There’s this house. It’s not unlike many other houses. Imagine what a house looks like.

It is also quite unlike many other houses. Imagine this house again.

Given that it is simultaneously not unlike and unlike other houses, it is exactly like all houses.