I'm sorry. You were expecting me to come home, and what you got was a ghost.

Trauma is a virus. And when we went to the crash site, it was spreading. People were trying to make sense of what they had seen, the horror they had witnessed and they kept repeating their stories, spreading it further and further.

An airplane crashed into an electrical tower and then smashed into the earth. We were there because we had eight families in the area, we wanted to see if there was any assistance we could provide. My colleagues probably thought the best thing they could do was listen, but I watched them get infected with the trauma until it was all I could do to get them out of there.

They will all do better with professional counseling, all of them. I will not talk about what I saw and what I heard because you do not deserve this illness, not even for a short amount of time.

There is a damp spot on your shoulder. There is an overdraft on your checking account. She is standing in the loading dock smoking a cigarette and watching herself in a pocket mirror. A homeless guy is digging in the garbage for a cup to piss into. Buses are pulling out of the lot at 8th and Folsom, charging downtown in a roaring herd.

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't mean that much. We eat the doughnut and long for the hole.

A bead of water rolls down the silver steel sink, drops to the black lip of the Insinkerator, and then out of sight. The refrigerator's exhaust fans kicks on. Coffee is cooling in the glass in my hands and I am working both ends of a conversation that has happened before and I suspect nothing very good will come from it.

In 15 minutes I will be at the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. A woman waiting there is wearing rubber boots that come up to her knees. She must be expecting something I don't know about.

And just like that it's spring. It's stopped raining, the air is clear. One side of the block smells like wild onions, the other of fluffy vanilla narcissus. The neighbors have let their clover go wild and it's a tangle of acid green and furled flowers. One cherry tree can't wait to get on with it and it has blossomed already.

The boy wants to tell me about the oldest survivor of the Crimean War, a tortoise the British took into battle as a mascot. We had an entire evening's adventure around a doorknob. I think it left me more invigorated then did him, but perhaps he knows more now about the secret lives of things we touch every day but do not notice.

I think the faucet is next, and the woodland strawberries.