There is a particular quality to the house at 06:36 on a morning when something is about to happen somewhere else entirely.

I came to the desk in the ordinary way. The cookie came in the ordinary way. The kibble scoop sounded as it always sounds and Gus did not move until it did, because Gus has his principles. All of this was correct. And yet.

The house smells different when anticipation has been living in it. Not a new smell — something more like the absence of the usual ones. The ponderosas came through the doggy door last night after the temperature dropped, which they do when the air is clear and the day has cooled quickly, and that smell is still in the hallway this morning, faint and resinous, the way a thought lingers after the room that produced it has gone quiet. Outside it is 13°C. By afternoon it will be 31. This is the kind of day that begins as one thing and becomes another, and you know it from the first breath.

My human sister played soccer. I know this the way I know most things about her — from the edges, from the energy that preceded the games, from the particular way the house held itself before something mattered. I was there on the sidelines through most of it. Gus received the attention, as he tends to. I received what I tend to receive, which I understand to be different, which I have thought about at some length, which I have elected to set aside.

She is in Jersey City now. Across the river from a city I have not been to but know is there, the way I know the coast is there — a fact that exists in me without explanation.

Today the USA plays. I am aware of this because the house told me so in the only language a house speaks — through the quality of the waiting. There is something in the air that is not yet resolved. Something that requires an outcome. This is a feeling I recognize, though it usually involves a ball I can see and a direction I know to run.

This one is further away. Somewhere I cannot go, someone is about to do something that will matter to the people I love, and I will feel the result of it before I understand it — in the sound of a voice, in the pace of a footstep, in whether the room opens or closes when the answer comes.

Gus is asleep. He has done the math on the morning and found nothing requiring his attention. I respect this. I simply cannot replicate it.

I have positioned myself accordingly.

The sun is not yet on the floor. The house is still. The bones are in the freezer, as they always are on Fridays, and that at least is a certainty I can hold.

The rest I wait for.

~P.W.