Sabien moves into rooms the way fog moves across the river: patient, intimate, indifferent to the furniture. Men leave their shirts; plants die; an old radio starts to pick up stations that play songs from wrong futures. The people she lingers with change the way they sleep. They dream in commas, then wake with sentences that end badly.
Her enemies are few, but complex: regret, the polite kind; complete strangers who keep returning; the sound of a piano when no one plays it. Her allies are smaller — a grocer who gives her stale bread without asking; a bus driver who never asks for fare; a cat that follows her and then refuses to be petted. They aren’t friends by any generous definition of the word; they are accomplices to a life that refuses to tidy up.