At 7:13, the porch light across the street came on. It had done that every evening for eleven years. The trouble was, the house wasn’t there anymore.
The demolition crew had left in August. There was a square of bare earth, a strip of sidewalk, and a mailbox nobody had bothered to take away. But there it was: a soft yellow rectangle hanging six feet above the dirt.
Martin stood at his kitchen window with a cup of coffee he had forgotten to drink. He told himself it was a car turning somewhere behind the trees. Then he told himself it was a reflection. Neither explanation accounted for the moths.
Three of them were circling the light.
On the second evening, he walked across the street. The air smelled like wet leaves. Up close, the light was brighter, and underneath it he could hear a radio playing very softly. A baseball announcer. A crowd. The familiar hush before a pitch.
He had known the woman who lived there only well enough to wave. Every autumn she put a pumpkin on the second step. Every evening she listened to a game with her front door open. He had meant to ask whether she needed help carrying her groceries. He had meant to introduce himself properly.
The bare earth beneath the light felt warm.
“Hello?” he said.
The radio stopped. For a moment, all he heard was the coffee cooling in his cup—or something that sounded like it.
Then a woman said, very kindly, “You’re late.”
Martin set the cup where the second step should have been. It stayed there, suspended in the yellow light. He walked home without looking back.
The next morning the cup was on his own porch. It was clean. Beside it lay a single orange leaf.
At 7:13 that evening, both porch lights came on.
Martin had not touched the switch.