08.02.04 - 12:50 p.m.

[...and, a half-finished forums post for Eva, which I think I eventually finished. I hope that, once I get settled again, I am once more writing this well. Right now, I'm just not.]

From the shadows of her front stoop, the kinfolk watches as the sky unleashes yet another fitful burst rain onto the already damp streets. She is protected from the rain by the narrow overhang and the building itself, half-inside, half-outside the door. And the door: that's something new, blaring new against the red brick fa�ade dulled from years of exposure to the elementals, both natural and man-made. Starkly white, painted thus far with only two coats of all-weather primer, steel-cored and stronger than the last.

Her stance, much like the door, is a concession to the disturbing encounter earlier in the week. The police had come - perhaps an hour after the actual event - and taken her statement and those of several neighbors (who saw nothing, if only because they wished to see nothing, because it is better not to get involved in such matter), but were bored or overworked or both or neither. (If you discharged your weapon into the alleged perpetrator four times, lady, the older one smirked, superior and pleased to be so, he wouldn't've ab-sconded from the alleged scene so quick.)

Self-contained, she watches the raindrops slap and spattered against the gilded, shining, rainslick streets without really seeing them. Nighttime appeals to her, the immediate physicality of objects, the sweep of shadows and the seethe of light, but tonight - for several nights - she has found the private pleasure of such observations lost to her. Occasionally, her dark gaze flicks over the small stretch of sidewalk where the homeless man (was it? certainly not. But what else could it be?) had huddled. She is almost as troubled by her own ill-advised choice to approach the man (thing?) as she is by his continued possible existance, somewhere, with four of her bullets in him.

She is not out of place, here, a slender figure in loose sweatpants and a worn, oversized hoodie. Dark hair scraped back, away from her still features, the thick ponytail lost in the shadows of the half-open doorway in which she stands.

Oily rainbows sheen the larger puddles that form in potholes, depressions, storm sewers. The temperature has remained above freezing, even at night, for at least three days and the city is putting on its finest colors: green bristles almost everywhere, fifty different shades from the yellow-green of prairie grasses to the deepest of mossy colors. In a month or two, all this exuberance will be lost to the heat of summer, and most of the little patches of grass and weeds now growing so vigorously will be sere, brown, dead from the inevitable and utterly noxious combination of heat and smog.

On one particular street, amidst a quiet series of mostly run-down rowhouses (once they must have been magnificent, or so one may assume, from the now-mostly-crumbling stonework on the window lintels, the intricate wrought iron gone to rust),