The azalea bush is surrounded by a chain link fence; it is in bloom. Deep in the night, mummified figments lie eerily scattered. The figments crack with electrified charges. A group of boys and girls play a singing game. They shine. Their voices settle like fossil dust; they are well-sung. A handful of the children kneel down to pick crabgrass. They frolic into the fields.

The matriarch of the house applies blusher, a mixture of beetroot and coconut oil, along her cheekbones. Wrapped in soft cloth, she sits at a vanity. The locusts stridulate. The cricketing transposes her through recall, back to the age before she shed her skin. Her bedroom is visible at angles from the fields. Upon approach, the estate emits a disarming glow; the children laugh. Dread does not impede or cover them. Outside is navy, and uncanny, and static.

There is an abstruse lighthouse that sprouts in an estranged dimension, adjacent to the rocky cusp, wherein the loch extends towards the shoal, and frenziedly untaps into the encircling nebula. Profuse oarfish swarm the surf with circumspection. In the umbra of nightfall, auroral figurines line the winding promenade like guards, bewitched by the lodestar, liege to its opalescence.

The hermetic keeper escalades the glowering tower. From the watch room, he surveils the irised buttresses of inception, the violet formations of the pixie sand macrocosmos, but there is no omen, no beacon from him, the defector. At times, the keeper is given to obliterate the buoyant lantern, purge the lacquered gifts, abscond the experimental theorem. But he knows that, even in so doing, its luster will nevermore atrophy.