Mikee lives in an old house on Molave Street. You won't find his house. It's one of those houses with little gates you pass by, thinking it can't possibly be the one your friend told you to go to. But we know where it is, and that little gate opens to a narrow, sloping, dark driveway, and you can enter through what once should have been the main door, or through the side where the kitchen still miraculously exists. It's the nature of cities that have gotten old without having grown up- people come and go, and it's the things they build and rebuild and cover and tear down that tell you something was there.
There was a garden once out on the front. In its place, three printing presses house machinery that spit out paper and the most curious staff that watch us warily when we arrive and leave, slip in and out, differently, always.
When it's daytime, the light is beautiful. Only in Mikee's room though, the rest of the house flickers in this fluorescent-tinted green permanence the way those old houses do here. I love this house. I love the friends Mikee lets in. I love that sometimes, I am that friend.
Mikee now has a smaller garden, and without telling us I know he named them all. It collected one day, the way one day a hen can be collecting sticks, and the next day there's a dozen fucking eggs incubating. Some of them are dead now, but since plants don't have feelings I'm sure the funerals were unmemorable. Mikee is a very specific mother hen.
There are no weak children in this house. It's not a threat. It literally just happens.
This house was- is, his family's. He's one of the last members who haven't immigrated to the States, the way so many friends, enemies, strangers, people do.
This house has been sold. And his garden grows, and so does the light.
