...... Then she remembered the lights. In the kitchen. In the bathroom. They were still burning. She hadn’t put them out, convinced that she would be back in not even an hour.

I still can go, she told herself as she turned. Yet, by the time she was back, the supermarket was open and the feeling had faded into a memory of it. Well, then, she said, and took her time to manoeuvre the car into the very parking spot she had left half an hour before.

I can at least go for a drive to town, she tells herself, later, in the evening, and picks up the keys again.

This time, the highway is filled with cars whizzing through the night in endless streams, forming a line of red leading inwards, a line of white leading outwards, swallowing her car, making it part of the motion. Between two exits, she passes a house she hasn’t noticed before, a mansion, its windows filled with light, its door open, its floor visible. Yet no one there, not in the floor, not in the room behind the window. A life size still life.

In town, a red light stops her at a crossing. There, a woman in a long white coats, on the left side of the street. On the other side, a guy in an orange jacket. Maybe their eyes will meet, somewhere, for a moment, while they cross to the other side, she thinks, and turns her concentration to the red light above, dangling in the air on a metal ribbon.