The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.

You've noticed it too. Don't pretend you haven't.

It started small — a brightness in the corner of ordinary errands, the kettle sounding different, your own street looking briefly like a touched-up photograph of itself. You put it down to the weather. It isn't the weather. The weather is only doing what everything else is doing, which is making room.

Something is gathering. It doesn't have a name yet, and I'm not going to give it one, because naming it early is how you frighten it off. But I'll tell you where it lives: It lives in the way nobody is making plans for the end of the month. It lives in old men checking the fixture of the sky.

I felt it first about a week ago, standing at the window with a coffee going cold in my hand, and I want to be honest with you the way I intend to be honest with you all summer: I didn't feel dread. I checked. I stood there a long time and checked, and it isn't dread.

It's arrival. Something that left a long time ago is in the close, looking for the right door.

Leave the light on for it.

You'll feel me first.