“What then?” Melissa asks curiously.

“What then what?”

“What are you doing at the end of the month?”

“Moving.”

“Moving!?”

“Yeah.”

“Where!?”

“‘Cross town,” Travis waves his hand in the general direction of Karen’s house.

“Oh.” Melissa breathes a sigh of relief. “I thought you meant you were moving away.” “No.” Travis says simply. After a moment of rolling the words around in his head, wondering if he should say it, he says, “Would it matter?”

Melissa stops in her tracks. She gives Travis a look that means he should know better than to have asked. She keeps walking and says, “Yes. It matters.”

They coast on small talk the rest of the way downtown, and when they get to the corner of College and Broad, Travis doesn’t know how to say goodbye, standing in front of his bike. She’s made up her mind to walk home instead, asking for a rain check on the bike ride, though. Travis jams his hands in his hip pockets and says, “There’s this party tonight…”

Melissa shakes her head lightly. Travis feels like she’s already walking down the street. “Not for a while, Travis, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I just need to get back to things, um, settle some things…”

“I guess I’ll see you around then.”

She gives in against her better judgment and steps close to him. She leans in and kisses him on the corner of his lip. After she does they look at each other. “I know where to find you. And I will” Then, she turns and walks away, leaving Travis standing next to Mary Jane with his hands still jammed in his pockets.

Unpacked and even arranged as sparsely as possible, his belongings barely took up a sixth of the floor space of the second floor of the factory. If he stood at the northwest corner of the floor (his belongings being in the southwest corner) and watched the dying light of the sunset fall across the Ohio River and lightly tread through the dirty glass of the factory windows, the whole of his quiet life took on the tenor of a strange experiment—a human terrarium in progress. And it seemed a reflection of his own chosen study of cognitive psychology that he never arrived home at the end of the stairs, but instead made the long seventy yard walk to his “apartment,” gradually and feeling himself under some kind of alien observation.

Those seemingly smoke-infested sunbeams, broken only by unchiseled paint on the glass, as that light faded to black and shadow, he came to live in an orb of his own light, surrounded by space that seemed to call him. Other than the amber of his two corner brick walls, he was surrounded by dark space, shadow, and possibility.