Chapter 1: The Beginning

Roseburn delighted in spreading rumours about its residents.

“How does a neighbourhood do that?”

In a concise, strongly worded letter, the oldest architectural building explains that these rumours were simply shouted off the roofs of all buildings. It is unclear WHO does the shouting, and as far as this historical piece of concrete is concerned, it is an unnecessary detail. This passive aggressive letter was co-signed by a number of other buildings, parking lots, and public parks, although not all of them had read it.

The residents had been uneasy ever since they found out their neighbourhood had become sentient and had disrupted their expectations from concrete structures. The parks closed and opened when they felt like it, the buildings moved around at night so that in the morning no one knew where they were or how far from the market they were, the market had also moved, the streets frequently erupted with adorable animals who refused to be petted, the trashcans flew open and sprayed passersby with its contents, unprompted, and the choreography of the musical water fountain was maddeningly off tempo. The residents lived in a state of uncertainty and terror and yet when they spoke of the neighbourhood to their relatives on the phone they spoke with condescension, fabricating their living conditions, because they believed themselves deserving of this luxurious lifestyle unlike their familial counterparts, way outside the metropolitan area, who were not deserving at all. Not one of these counterparts suspected a thing. And after this semi-regular blow to their own ego, stopped phoning altogether.

Alone in their misery, the residents had adapted a code, wherein no one acknowledged Roseburn’s descent into madness and ascent to power. And so, if you were in conversation with a friend you bumped into on the street, and if that street morphed into a giant hole in the ground, the appropriate thing to do for both of you was to climb down into that hole and carry on the conversation. If a dog bit you in the middle of this conversation you were to bottle the scream and save it for later, perhaps let it out in your room where no one could hear you. These were instances of the code in practice. For a lot of the residents, it was a helpful one. But there were a few who wished to sit down with Roseburn and arrive at a compromise. For example, could the buildings move around every OTHER day rather than every day? Could 1 out of 5 dogs be amenable to petting? Could just one cat be “psspsspssssssdd”? The list went on, but Roseburn was not having it. It was going to do whatever it felt like doing and did not want to be reasoned with. In fact the local library changed the definition of reasonable to mean “any act, thought, or nightmare that the neighbourhood (roseburn) deemed reasonable.” When argued that the definition itself was unreasonable since it employed circular reasoning, Roseburn pointed the residents towards the library and walked out of the meeting.

As it did, it screamed the first of the rumours from the rooftop of the oldest architectural building.

“One of you has lice,” it shouted gleefully, “and soon, more of you will have lice.”

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Chapter 2: The Quarantine

The residents were quarantined and there were frequent eruptions of tears and artistic expression. One resident took to writing a powerful letter detailing all the things she missed dearly. She read it out on her podcast which had, in these unprecedented times, experienced a surge of new listeners.

I miss the days we were outside in the sun.

Basking in friendship and bathing in hope.

At night, the moon was our companion and now we only see her through obstructions like windows and curtains and other people’s sad poetry.

I miss the local fauna and flora. I miss the places I never visited, and the neighbours I didn’t like.

I miss the local bars and sitting around for ages for my best friend to arrive because she’s always late and it’s always the bloody traffic. I miss counting the seconds this would be over and I could head back home. I miss saying “i missed you” to somebody’s face and watching them smile, then checking this activity off my to do list and buying myself 6 more months of solitude, minimum. I miss avoiding people I faintly know in any public space. I miss “accidentally” bumping into that bitch friend who’s been trying to avoid me in all those public spaces.

I miss the dedication with which I rejected invites to house parties and birthday dinners and mediocre plays that I secretly love but loudly criticise.

I miss being the only opinionated asocial introverted hermit trying to build a twitter following through my dry wit and edgy humour about being an opinionated asocial introverted hermit.

I miss having my own thing.

You stole my whole thing. Fuck you.

Another resident woke up to find herself in a dramatic scene, so she sat up and ran her hands through her hair, stared back at her bed then looked outside the window, the sun was warm and also moody, like her. She cut to her bathroom where she splashed water in her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror, all the mood reflecting back at her dramatically. She cut to a close up shot of her phone and saw 37 voice notes. As she went about her day, doing routine things in moody transition cuts, the voice notes played over each scene, one by one, infusing new meaning and context into these mundane activities. She remained in this genre for a few days.

No one knew why any of it happened. Who brought it here, the lice. It can’t be me, said somebody, out loud to nobody. It can’t be me, said somebody else’s neighbour. No one ever thinks it’s them. Except Michael. He knew it was him. However, he wants it to be noted that he doesn’t HAVE lice, he had merely BORROWED them from the neighbourhood across the lake, and he swears he’s going to return it if everyone would just stop panicking. But now he’s stuck, caught with a dead body he can’t dispose of, caught in a rumour he can’t dispose of.

Five lanes over Michael’s art teacher stared at a painting Michael had been working on before the quarantine was instated. She touched the paint sticking out of the canvas softly, in shapes, and traced the highest points of each stroke like it was her first time feeling colour. What did Michael mean? She had meant to ask but everything happened so fast, she was stuck with this canvas deciphering the colours, the countless thin legs sticking out of the bulbous grey body. She knew what he had painted; it was a singular louse magnified to stretch onto a 4 foot canvas. But why had he? And not the functional “why” as in "what was the reason”, but the philosophical “why”, as in “what could possibly be the reason”, or the rhetorical “why” as in “is there ever a reason?”

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Chapter 3: The Family

N was aware of how different their partner’s upbringing was from their own. S moved around the house with authoritative ease. She must not have been hit as a child. She didn’t expect a twist at every turn, paths conjured before her as she walked. In the mornings she whistled while making herself a cup of coffee. N feared the morning, when everything had the potential to reset. But they found themself relaxed around S, after years of observing her temperament, she was comfortingly predictable.

Lately, nothing was predictable. S was around all the time. She moved easily still, but there was an agitation in her step. Like her face housed pockets of volcanic anger.

Is everything ok? N asked

What? S snapped, yes of course. Sorry I’m just preoccupied. She placed her hand on N’s cheek in a familiar gesture.

At night she stepped out, N never knew where. Tonight they were going to follow her.

Here is a well kept secret - the neighbourhood was surrounded by nothing. They were in fact the only people there. Boxed in, with nowhere to go. Or, depending on how you looked at it, they had an entire world outside, ripe with potential. A world as yet uninhabited, that they could do with whatever they wanted. It had occurred to no one to want.

This is where S went, each night. She stepped out of the neighbourhood boundary by simply walking long enough and far enough.

N followed her. The wind drummed against their ears - a rhythmic hammering as if by a knife. S led her through concrete roads laid between concrete towers that shifted lazily at this hour. N kept a reasonable distance. 20 minutes into this journey, the landscape changed into something unfamiliar. Grass had appeared beneath them. They took off their shoes and felt the pleasure of each blade soft against the pads of their feet, bending and enveloping their heels up to their ankles. They knew this was elsewhere because it wasn’t here. The here that everyone knew of. Up ahead, S broke out into a light jog, crunching the distance with long easy strides. N followed suit, until the appearance of a beautiful frozen lake astonished them enough to halt in their tracks. S had reached the edge of the grass, and through the thicket of trees, N could see her float side to side, with no purpose, just boundless energy. It was difficult to recognise it as joy just yet. S swayed across the greens, danced an ode to the lake in front of her. She moved the way she used to back at home, N thought.