Rouen Cathedral, suburban facade (noon).

Woken at midday with my mouth dry like cheap champagne, the kind sipped from large glasses with silicone bendy straws, flutes unavailable for lack of class. Heady, pulsating summer offers no reprieve: sticking my face in the refrigerator for a cool wind, my hand shoved deep in the can—a tunnel to China, to territories where mental health patients risk surveillance, and hard to get to by tunnel these days,—to recover one leftover lychee from last night’s mimosaing, mimosaed decadence; nude fruiting bodies peeled and soaked in syrup, wide mouths still brimming with laughter like paid entertainers not yet done with their act. Cold juice spills across my fingers. Sucking on a digit, a droplet of coolness, I greet the cat warmly and step around her. There is no reply because she is a strong and silent type.

Rouen Cathedral, suburban facade (afternoon).

The radio plays a song I once could strum on guitar, one that sounds like a redux of middle school summers: running away on the next Southern train to escape sincere but impossible promises, youth’s irrational longings. Now the radio host is talking about melanoma, and I change the station to mute her. A plane cuts by as a firetruck passes like an elevator plummeting through a building. Planar, occupying the blue endless void of the sky. I take a pair of craft scissors out of a child’s hands and cut its design out from its surroundings, shapely, an origami bird. It soars without commotion, white wing silently reflective in aerodynamic drift—making the roads and intersections feel small, a street view on tilt shift. The people are reduced to toy models, their problems shrunk down like cashmere on first wash.