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In your mind's eye, a scythe lops off his head.

Now, the super's head looms in pinkness and you need to stabilize yourself with deep breathing and relaxation techniques you learned in Special Ops. No, you were never in Special Ops. Techniques from an infomercial. Breathe deeply. Are you breathing deeply?

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More About

• Robert Rini
• Mumbai
• Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Itzhak Perlman

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Breathe deeply.

She's standing by the punch clock pulling off friction tape, surrounded by men in army fatigues. They scan her body with a metal detector, but you can't hear their comments. You want to walk up and tell her something . . . but instead you squeeze past and check out. Outside, the night sky is a fine spray of stars.

The ice-cream truck is waiting by the curb, and inside, in the glow of an overhead light, Balaganda's husband studies an engineering textbook.

You frisk yourself for your keys and hear something in the bushes. Raymond is hiding behind a ragged Scotch broom.

"I see you, Raymond," you say. "Your boot."

Silence.

"Come on, Ray."

"Fuck you, man. They got your little foreign chick."

"Sure, Ray. Sure thing. I'm going home."

You drive home through dark rain-slickened streets with the radio playing, long-distance dedications drowning out the hissing tires and this desolate stretch of the city, and you hum along, streaming past these weak yellow lights of all-night convenience stores, carpet warehouses, porn shops, bars stinking of the special loneliness of swing shifters, until you finally rise from the city on an overpass that coils left as you shift gears and punch in another radio station in one gorgeous fluid movement.

At home you doze off in your easy chair facing the War, but you dream of beautiful lotus blossoms drifting down the Ganges, smoke rising in shrouds from funeral pyres, ashen sadhus with brilliant white teeth. And somewhere, somewhere in the land of secrets, an elephant stands silently in a moonlit field.

Freelance illustrator Robert Rini recently showed his work at Roq la Rue Gallery. He plays guitar in the garage band the Simpletones and once operated the Big Machines at the Mail Annex, the setting for this story.