We walk in the low light of dusk, feet swishing through leaf-littered footpaths rising from the village up onto campus, onto quiet hillside streets, into the woodsy neighborhood tucked far from everything but itself. Kitchen lights shine from windows to show incandescent families sitting down to dinner, mouths moving but telling nothing behind glass, silent as unopened books. We stop and watch: a woman sets a steaming pot on the table; a man touches the small of her back, smiles approval. From where we stand, they shine like gods. Wind trickles through trees. Our breaths whiten, barely there. Unnoticed, we pass by.

Last night was the year’s first frost, and though nearly a whole day has passed, everything – from the lawns to the windows, to the sharpened air itself – seems painted in a muting translucence, the detached memory of a dream. Each breath bites with the ripe scent of cold trees and pitch, a marriage of fullness and age. Without moving, without meaning, everything is completely changed.

Secreted behind a giant’s slouching shoulder – a looming foothill nearby – the sun slowly dims like the lights before the curtains part, stretching Angela’s shadow through mine, casting Siamese scarecrow figures on the pavement, extending from separate, unmalformed feet. The sky shifts prismatic through darkening indigos while hardwood leaves – the tangerine of oak, the mango of sumac, the concord of Norway maple – appear to grow more luminous as the daylight fades into gloaming, each blade filled with its own ephemeral glow.

Along the street, lights wink on: behind windows, above doors.

Nearly half a year has passed since our last walk through this neighborhood, early last spring on a midnight work-break: I from my senior thesis, she from a coiled sculpture. We met in the dark on the quad to ascent through a night uncommonly mild and warm with snow lurking beneath pine-boughs and lightning flashing in all directions but straight above, surrounding our valley town as if we were the eye of an obstinate, unmoving storm.
We walked that night as we walk now: arms laced and pace casual, absorbed in our studied environment and laughing unaffected at the simple things we find. A house with school-red doors and shutters, a school-green bench on the porch; a mauve-bricked chimney on a sterile grey roof; an out-of-place post-and-beam barn: things found once and found again now, but some things are new, are seasonal landmarks. Between two deck props, a mesh web binds a skeleton in its threads while a toy spider hovers over its prize. Cornhusks erupting beneath his pumpkin head, a stuffy-man guards his dooryard. I remind myself none of this is ours. A blow-up Frankenstein monster skulks in a hedge.

A coven of figures, cloaked in sheets and luminous in the twilight, stand in a ring in a yard: ghost children suspended in dance. At other houses, along walkways and in grey grass, towels sprawl over various ornaments – knickknacks and plants – are armor against last night’s frost, against the frost to come. In the context, though, they are more decoration: ghost flowers, ghost bushes, ghost rocks.

We sneak unseen between homes like two burglars stealing scenery, but it’s only when we see the cat that I begin to understand what we’re doing, am able to interpret our watchful passage, our murmuring text of steps. Curled tightly against the base of a weeping pine, at the boundary between forest and empty lot: first a flawless circle of back turned toward us; then gold-eyed and baleful, disapproving over a shoulder; then again, the tightening.

It looks like a stone in the grass.

A pride of feral cats haunts this side of town, an abandoned litter, maybe, that grew into an unquestioning presence, spectral and ubiquitous, white as sun-bleached bones. The sort Poe would have loved and feared.

We stand and watch the cat turn from and into stone, then move on. Angela squeezes herself against my captive arm: an awkward hug. We’re heading downhill now, toward the apartment where we share most meals. I bite my cheek and wonder at what we’re doing.

Angela points at a yellow plastic tricycle, impossibly small and parked beneath a mailbox. I stop and ask her if she’s ever found something that she wasn’t sure was real. Maybe it was in the woods at dusk, was plain and white like a river-worn stone, then suddenly revealed itself as something else – unique, worth studying – a feral cat in the woods. Maybe it was only a cat for a moment, then again became perfect and still, indicating nothing but a history of stone, a future of further stone. How long did she watch it, hoping it to become something more? How long before she moved on, leaving the mystery behind? or did she touch it, draw near, force the unknown into fact, hypothesis to conclusion? How long before the stone sprang away as a troubled, feral cat? How long did it remain still, cold and impersonal, a petrified Gorgon relic?
How long must something stay the same before it can ever change? How long must something change before it can ever be the same?

Yet even as I ask, I imagine them all around. In one house, a husband is called in for dinner, looks up in surprise from his paper to see his wife framed in the doorway while elsewhere, a widower sits down to eat a quiet supper all alone. Chairs scrape over floors, bodies settle before tables. Somewhere a little girl asks to be excused, puts her plate in the sink, runs to the Lite-Brite hidden beneath her bed.

Angela waits for my questions to end. A bedroom light winks on, winks out. Then we turn and head down the hill, through campus into town to cook dinner and wash dishes, share news without listening, touch privately before sleep, play the roles that we are not. Objects affecting life. Stuffed clothes posed as people. Ghost flower. Ghost bush. Ghost rock.