She was already sitting in his car when he came outside. The first thing he noticed was that her hair was back to normal. It had unnerved him to see the dark cascade sweeping unbound and tangled down her back almost more than it had to see her unclothed body. Now it was severely fastened back in its usual tight plait over her shoulder. The familiarity of the image created an intense sense of detachment in him from those sights and worries that had seemed to erupt unlawfully out of the bare present. James vaguely made sure to lock up the house, turning the key first in the interior door of the entrance and then the large wooden exterior one after it. When he finished doing this, he made his way across the cobbled stone to the vehicle and to her. I was only after he had taken a few steps that her realized how heavy the air pressing against him was. It clung about his clothes like the unseen, bog-like atmosphere of dreams, anchoring him in an alien immediacy. A car backfired somewhere in the distance and the sparse chirping of birds followed. Overhead, a narrow vein of lightening slashed across the swollen sky like jagged glass.
James stiffly forced himself into the driver's seat with the imprint of the fissure now burning into his vision. She was next to him now, head bowed, eyes averted, and the infrared fissure cleaving her image into two fragments of a giant negative. He shut and locked the car door and there was viscid styrofoam silence.