Foreboding” might have been the appropriate word. “Dread.” The PROMISE of fear. It was tangible fear... smellable... the stale odor soaking into the dirt and lingering in the windless jungle of dead branches and train tracks to nowhere; lovelier than angst, kinder than panic.

The feeling was FEAR, she realized... but it was a new type of fear; more sincere than the jitters she felt when it rained and not as piercing as the terror of crashing cars. This fear was darker somehow... mysterious... curious like the retracted paws of an alley cat.

New sounds rustled through her anti-depressant haze; a gentle reverberation from the heart of the home... another creek... another thunk... rapid clicking like the wings of a broken cricket. Then, raindrops on metal... the escalating blare of a car horn... the scream of wet tires and the clink clink clink of showering glass.

Trevor climbed once again to the land of the living, naked except for an antique gas mask strapped to his face. As he peered through glass eyes like a mutant fly and breathed through the alien snoot, a single thought coiled through the booby-trapped labyrinth of his brain:
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.

Trevor could almost see the invisible gas leaking from the broken furnace, billowing around his body, wafting in his wake from the laundry room to the living room, seeking out the nostrils of the realtor, the yuppies, the toddler, and every other goddamn trespasser before seeping into their bloodstream and infecting their cells until they dizzied, ached, barfed, and fell to the floor like a bunch of—
He caught himself.
He breathed through his nose.
He pushed away the hate, calmed the tornado strangling his gut, and thought of HER.

She grappled his shoulder and pulled him closer; her nose in his neck and the memory-scent of her very first time; that sickly-sweet stench of day-old sweat and mall cologne... she wondered if he’d showered in the ten months since they last shared a bed.