He looked up from the table and away from his laptop. It was too bright to pass for natural amidst the dim surroundings, and briefly he recalled that more than this exists.

There was a girl once.

She would smile and he would smile, stretching a face far too often frozen in scholarly apathy. You see, he had been enamored with becoming that cliché, the aloof yet always observant writer, and he had mistaken her affection as proof that she felt the same. So, instead of opening up and showing her the real him, he put on more and more of it. Gradually this mask, ensconced as it was upon his face, had replaced his face till neither he nor she could even recall who he was without it. Reeling from these unwanted memories, he decided to leave the café.

Rejecting his laptop's luminescent attention, he closed the screen and placed it into his bag. Then he slung the bag's strap over his shoulder and escaped into the cool night. There the brisk air refreshed him and the darkness soothed his eyes. Walking farther, he heard the pitter-patter from his sneakered feet and the occasional shudder from a Mad Max-ish sweeper truck roaming the pre-dawn streets. Ducking to avoid the scraggly arm of a nearby dogwood, he was crouching when he saw her.

At first he thought the huddled darkness was the carcass of a too-slow-to-react deer, but then he saw stilettos instead of hooves.

With the sharp sound of his gasp and the rapid drumming of his heart both fresh in his ears, he felt his eyes fall upon a small rectangle of light glowing next to a pale hand. Tinny carnival music crept into his ears as he inched forward. He could just make out the words flashing on the phone's screen . . . Thomas Hardling. His own name.