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the jittery clank of the ancient steel radiator, the thin whistle of static from an unseen radio. The pen halts and Sara tears the page from her notebook and hands it to me. The sheet is blank.
    A tense murmur wafts through the house. More people squeeze inside the room. Someone asks me to display the sheet
and it produces an eerie silence, as if I were an executioner raising his victim’s head above the crowd. Nobody wants to tell me that the last person who received a blank page from Sara died soon afterward. Nobody wants to explain that it’s akin to drawing the tarot card of the skeleton astride his emaciated steed. One of the assistant oracles leans close and whispers, “I’m sorry.” All eyes are set on me. Only Sara’s gaze is elsewhere, transfixed by the coastline of torn paper that clings to the margins of her notebook.
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    The blank sheet sticks out of my back pocket. I stand on the lone strip of road and stare up at the oracles’ house. A tireless rain spits from the sky and puddles around my feet. My clothes are soggy. My lungs burn. It stings every time I cough. The curtains of the upstairs window are closed, but eventually Sara will have to show her face.
    I scoop several handfuls of wet gravel. It’s easy to find ammunition in Monrovia. Everything is in ruins: the rotting porches, fallen tree limbs, incinerated automobile husks. Even the road I’m standing on—an aborted strip of asphalt that runs through the center of the village and evaporates before it reaches the woods—comes apart under your fingernails.
    My first throw misses by several inches. The second ricochets off the sill with a dull clatter. But the third strikes a direct hit, the pebbles rattling brightly against the second-story window pane. There’s no way she’s not hearing this.
    Eventually the curtains part and Sara appears in the window. She flits there for a few seconds, her plump palm resting flat against the pane. Her gaze runs straight through me as if I’m already dead. I shout her name, but the only thing that answers me is a warm handprint on the glass that’s already beginning to evaporate.
    The wind blusters in a succession of frigid gusts. My face is
raw and chapped. My hands won’t stop trembling. It feels like I’m coming apart. I launch another fistful of gravel at the window. The stones jangle off the rotten wooden siding, but none of them even scrapes the second floor.
    â€œYour aim is for shit.”
    It’s the skinhead girl. She adjusts the tips of her horn-rimmed glasses as if trying to bring my curious activity into better focus. The rest of the road is empty, but the other kids must be watching, too. Hosts of them are squatting in the surrounding derelict bungalows. It’s easy to imagine their round faces, like balls on strings, suspended in the dirty windows. I let the rest of the pebbles sift through my fingers.
    â€œYou freaked out by the blank page?” the girl asks.
    â€œOf course not,” I say. “It doesn’t have to mean something bad.”
    â€œThat so?”
    â€œMaybe it’s like my destiny is still wide open. Nothing’s been written yet. Everything is still up to me. That’s pretty good, right?”
    â€œSo why are you out here in the rain throwing rocks at their window?”
    I start to sneeze. Violent, hunched over, full-body sneezes. My eyes are red and watery. My entire body aches. The skinhead girl opens her umbrella and holds it over us. The raindrops thrum against the plastic canopy and it sounds like all the pebbles I’ve lofted into the air are slowly tumbling down on my head. “Maybe they made a mistake,” she says softly.
    â€œIt’s no big deal,” I say. “Just some old sheet of notebook paper.” I pluck the page from my back pocket and stretch it between my hands. I find myself holding it up like a blank billboard toward Sara’s window. My