listening to your lesson while getting ready to go outside to the market to buy some walnuts for breakfast. i hear a loud shrieking noise. i wonder if it is in the recording. then i think about the fact that i’m not spending enough time on my chinese. the shrieking continues. is it little girls? the sound is so high-pitch then i realize it must be the neighbourhood dogs. i open the slide door to hear better. someone accross the street is looking out the window too. then i notice that the red lantern that hung outside the ninth floor window opposite me has fallen to the ground. much later as i get off the subway, a sudden empty patch of space appears amid a sea of commuters and a lost glove, middle finger pointing upward. fuck you. jerry’s world is a cleaner world, cindy’s is a polluted one. jerry coloured his bus exhaust smoke cloud blue. cindy coloured it grey. then later as i’m about to go for a run i see someone has hung the fallen, dented lantern from a tree.