His head floated with electronic sounds, too-perfect drum machines, and feminine vocals. His footfalls played rhythms on cracked nighttime pavement. Smells of wet, smells of smoke, smells of the gutter he stepped across. His shoulders flexed and broadened under the strap of his bag, and his chin raised to the sky, expansive, moving in every corner of his sight with a gentle texture of raindrops.
"I wonder what she's been doing in my apartment all day," he thought. The rise and fall of her breathing was still in his mind's eye. Surely by now, she had unfurled her limbs and risen to move about. He pictured her warm, soft body, her dark eyes, passing from room to room, picking up and inspecting his things in silence from behind an inscrutable fringe.
As he passed through the park, nearing home, a movement and glint on the footpath drew his gaze. There, near his feet, was a lump of some composite of matter: fur, bone, dirt, flesh, a shiny slick of wet red, come to rest under a fluorescent park lamp. He slowed to identify the object, and noticed his heart catch in his chest as he failed to identify what animal it had once been. Its head seemed too large for a rat, and its limbs too small.
Before he got closer and inspect it, a rush of black feathers and a sharp woosh stopped him abruptly. He flinched and cowered before realising a large black bird had plucked the corpselike thing from the path bad held it, dangling in the moonlight from its sharp beak. Its bright yellow bead of an eye, the eye of a predator, assessed him fearlessly. His hand slipped to his pocket and he turned off his music. The two stood in still silence for a moment before the bird wedged its feet in the ground, pushed off, and carried its prize back into the night.
He noticed a crease on his brow he was unable to dismiss all the way to his front door step. He lifted the key with a funerary reverence and delicately inserted it into his door, unsure what he would find behind it.
