The children who never grow up live in the shadows. They emerge only when the light is failing, those luminous hours of dusk. I know because I’ve watched them in this park, all my adult life, and they have not aged. The man who strings giant soap bubbles into the air for them, he changes. His hair is now white. The children know, as the man does not, that within those bubbles lie entire worlds of life and possibility. Their laughter as they burst the fragile skins has no particular malice to it, but they give me a chill, these children who do not know time.

There is a white-haired woman who lives in the attic and dances at night. I hear her up there, on windy nights especially, leaves rasping in the trees outside my window. I hear the sound of her feet beating out a rhythm all their own, alongside the groan of old pipes and older wood. When I climb to the attic in the morning it will be empty, scuff marks in the dust from one woman’s dreams. When I enter the attic at sunrise I will open the windows and I will write, in the company of dancing, dreaming ghosts.