Other People's Dreams II

I took a sip of the tea. It was so overladen with sugar that I could feel the sweetness on the inside of my skull. My scalp curdled a little bit, the skin and hair rucking up from my neck like a carpet on a polished floor. "It's good," I said.

"Simple syrup," Steve said. He looked at me for a minute and then back at the Coliseum.

And I've got to go on record about a couple of things here. The first one is that I don't know whether or not I should be capitalizing the "c" in Coliseum. Obviously, I made my choice and it's on the side of capitalization. But this structure is not the one and only coliseum, the one that people usually refer to when they use the word. It overlooks Binghamton and Johnson City and the Susquehanna River near the borderlands of New York State. In mid June the valley was lush green, velvet hillsides. I could hear bugs buzzing in the woods. A few fireflies started to glow at the edge of Steve's yard. And you could hear motorcycles winding up the road behind his house.