Scraps of broken buildings lay landpiled everywhere like bodies of dead whales, hunked and white. I needed to get home. People on all sides of me strove forth leaning, dogged like swimmers through a sudden city downpour.
A stranger came in front of me and leaned up to look into my face. His hair buffed out black, cloudy, his eyes white, slick and clayfaced, and he muttered some plangent sound at me but he was clearly underwater, and I could not hear him. Nevertheless he grabbed my hand and led me down the street as if it was now his way we were taking. He yanked on my wrist and it hurt me with that uncomfortable slip that wet skin has against anything. I struggled pettily. The wet was thick, and grabbed my feet.
He brought me to the dentist's office, a white ramshackle half-hexagon kind of place with chipped rose moldings and walls paneled with whitewash now peeling, showing black. A roaring wind was in there, and the wet man shouted in my face to never go where I was going, but I fought against the wind. A plaque on the wall screamed SSSSHHH at me and I reached the door, the carpet squirting under my feet. The man blew out the other frame, a white wind sucking up a handkerchief, and as I crossed the threshold in the black night all was still.
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