It was midday when Julie discovered Banyon Street. She turned left, shielding her eyes from the cresting sun, and eased the old Ford Escort into a steady crawl while she scrutinized house numbers. A crumpled receipt was cradled between her fingers, crude directions scratched into the paper, she clung to it like a lifeline. On the lawn of one of the larger homes, a small army of children gathered around a giant inflatable pool, the pretense of bathing had been long abandonned, and instead they exchanged bulging waterbombs and high-pressured streams of Super Soaker fire. The ringing of laughter faded and an eerie silence descended upon the neighbourhood, the sedan creaked to a halt.

Julie glanced out of her window. One hundred and thirteen Banyon Street. She sunk miserably, the chair exhaled a waft of peaches and cigarettes. While the engine ticked cool, she checked her purse on the passenger seat; first, she removed a couple of ziplock bags full of orange peel, sealed away like articles of evidence from her hateful seven-state roadtrip, and then she checked her cellphone, there was a new message:

We're gonna miss you. Cassie. xx

"Yes, like hell you are," she muttered, and once the message was deleted, the phone was tossed back in her purse.

The car door opened with its usual cacophony of croaks and groans, and Julie was instantly greeted by a hot sticky blast of air that reminded her of cheap restraunt kitchens. It was nothing like New Haven. Here, she drank water and prized the shirt from her back like velcro. She closed the car door behind her with a thud, and how damning it sounded. So this was her new home.

Compared to most other residences on Banyon Street it was a tawdry affair. It was just about two floors worth of house, the second floor looking like a half-hearted attic conversion with a window fit for a hobbit, whereas the broad downstairs window, on the other hand, was almost completely obscured by an obnoxious spindley sycamore that plunged the rest of the house into darkness. And someone, at some point in their lives, chose to paint it all a piss-pale shade of yellow ochre. Sick bastards.

Having seen enough, Julie turned to the car and gave the trunk a guilty once over, she knew full well the horrors that lurked beneath its dark blue chassis and decided to leave them there. Instead, she emptied the backseat of its contents; namely her work, timetables, textbooks, folders, external hard drives, stationary, and lucky rolodex; it was piled high inside a large cardboard box, and with the addition of some last minute paperwork from the university, danced on the dangerous side of overflowing. She clamped the paperwork under her chin and kicked the door shut.

To think, everything that was most precious to her in the world could be squeazed inside a single cardboard box. Fitting, she thought, that it would be her work she was carrying over the threshold first. There was an entirely superfluous path, which she refused to take, that cut a picturesque S-shape in the lawn. Picturesque, that is, were it not for the fact that in patches the lawn reached Julie's knees. Inwardly, she wretched, this was not her home.

Halfway to the chipped terracotta steps, a stiff wind trundled in through the trees, rousing her feeble sycamore into limp-limbed action, and like an unscrupulous thief-in-the-night swept down upon its unsuspecting victim, and stole away with her paperwork, scattering it across the garden.

"Fucking shit it!"