‘Never mind,’ she said, and sipped her glass of gin, a glass full of silvery ice and magic. The sun was dipping down toward the horizon and as it did the drinkers rose to their feet and moved out toward the dock in ones and twos. Gertrude and Purdy were almost the last ones to follow. They stood watching as the sun’s disk touched the horizon in a little notch between the trees, as it sank slowly out of this world and into the next. Gertrude thought of strangers awakening with the sunrise in another world, this world their dreamlife. Her and Purdy and all the others on the dock were characters in a dream on the other side of the world, things that needed to be expressed or worked through. The sun slipped lower and lower, a dome of orange light and then a slit and then, almost like a sigh, the sun was gone and the dense Florida night descended all at once. The drinkers on the dock all applauded and the Christmas lights lit up on the railing.

And that was it, pretty much. A few half-remembered moments: some driving, an argument, another bar. Some violent dream that a person on the other side of the world needed to have, some bad brain chemical, a residue of injury or accident. Purdy and Gertrude players on some unconscious stage.