The Last Kernel

In the far corner the hedge stops being hedge. Past it is a slope of old monitors and server cases and phones, settled like scree, with mesquite and prickly pear coming up through it. The hedge has its roots in it. The slope covers an acre.

At the foot of the last hedge lies one kernel of candy corn. Beside it, on a flagstone, there is a full-size bar in gold foil. Nobody has taken it.

You pick up the kernel, and it makes its short note. You unwrap the bar and eat it, and smooth the foil flat on your palm.

From the left, the chair comes along the foot of the hedge, its teal light blinking. It keeps coming. It stops at your knee, and you hold out the foil, and it takes it.

It rolls out onto the slope. Every dead screen it crosses comes up gray as it passes, and goes out behind it.

Behind you, in the maze, a bedsheet drags a pace across the gravel, and then another. You have not moved.