All morning my mom complained about the smell in the alley. She fanned the air in front of her nose, and I copied her movements. With our noses pointed high, I hoped we looked the same.

The summer I was four, she let me play in the alley every day. She’d bring out an old, folded lawn chair and sip lemon water as I drew with chalk. The alley was always empty, so she would leave me in the road occasionally to take a call or switch the laundry. Still, she watched me through the window in our kitchen.

I remember her leaving to empty the dishwasher, plugging her nose. I continued with my chalk until a heavy gust of wind came. The smell clawed its way into my nose, filling my throat. My mouth watered. I stumbled towards it on the uneven pavement. I filled with the scent in heavy, deep breaths.

A few houses down the street I stopped above a dead squirrel, dried from the sun. It was in the middle of the street; tire tracks shaped its body into grooves. Its fur was matted and dyed red with cracking blood. I pet it tentatively, like it was a dog known to bite. I was so hungry.

I first saw Mott at the botanical gardens.

A strange scent floated on the breeze. Burnt plastic. And the cherry blossoms, at the end of their season, left behind a sea of pink petals.

When I stepped onto the main grove, adrift waves of drunk dandelions wisping their seeds into the wind, a young man burst through the crowd and shoved past me. He was there and gone in a second. Two officers pursued, but they were outmatched. A few minutes later, he brushed against me again, nearly lapping his would-be captors.

Martha had wanted to leave Toth Town for a while.

‘I want to go there,’ she said one Sunday at her parents’ house.

Her mother’s spoon circled the cup, porcelain clicking softly against porcelain.

‘This is as good as it gets here,’ her father, Tom, replied.

‘I’ve applied for a loan.’

Her mother, Zandra, didn’t look up. ‘Sounds like you’ve already made your decision.

“You wanted my eyes, and now you’ll only see pain.” He drew his last breath. Through his single eye, he would forever see visions of his courageous mother, witnessing the eternal damnation of a man who attempted to change his fate all too late. He had captured redemption in his paradise.

As she looked out over the frosted gray landscape from her early morning, winter sun-soaked porch, the painfully cold wooden floorboards of her third-floor balcony bit into her feet as she crossed the deck. When she settled at the railing, standing where the sun had struck the wood, that the cedar gradually warmed as the heat escaped her soles. The stiff ache that permeated her ankles, shins, and knees from the frozen, crystal-covered floor, as it waned, was comforting. It was a small reminder that one can endure much more than thought possible.