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seemed, keep himself from trying to fuck me. Destruction. Conflagration. A rider on a pale horse. Civilization falls. Millions dead. Oh, the humanity.
    I could not control the reactions of my body. Deep breaths only led to swells of desire. So I did the only thing I could do, there in that hideous excuse for a loft: I cleaned it.
    Start in one spot. Clean that spot. Move onto the next.
    Gather the clothes—they would have to be washed—and put them in a pile. A pile of papers, at first glance a contract—set those in a neat stack. Another pile of papers—receipts? Again on the stack. More paper, poetry and lyrics and scrawled musical notes—new pile.
    Trash. Beer bottles, beer cans, a mirror with traces of white powder on it—no trash bags yet, but slated for an inevitable end. Blankets piled high in the corner on a bare mattress, faded and looking as though they had last been washed before Lollapalooza. Debate, but into the trash. Flip the mattress over, find it fairly clean. Fine. Leave it there.
    Two extra guitars and a bass, one violin, and a set of bagpipes—set them up along the far wall, as gently as possible. I had no idea how bagpipes are supposed to be properly stored, but what the hell. Ah—a few small bags from the local drugstore. Excellent. All smaller trash—grocery receipts, candy bar wrappers, old pens and broken pencils—headed into the plastic bags. The condom jar went straight in without a second thought. I unearthed several cell phones—they went next to the pile of contracts, but the torn paperback books belonged on top of the papers full of poetry and music...and on... and on... and on...
    “Um.”
    The fog receded and I blinked, finding myself on my hands and knees, using a torn old t-shirt to wipe down the baseboards surrounding the loft. I looked up to see Carter hanging off the white ladder, staring at me as though he had never seen me before.
    “Yes?” I asked him, annoyed. The baseboards were filthy...
    His face was almost comical as he surveyed the suddenly emptied loft. Except for a few small piles in the corner of junk and trash carefully sequestered from the well organized space, it was remarkably livable now. Throw a few sheets on the bed, maybe install a bathroom and a lamp and you could live the rest of your days in this place. If you wanted to be a bohemian poet, that is. And sometimes I did.
    He appeared to shake himself, though the expression of shock did not leave his features. “I, uh, I just wanted to tell you that rehearsal was over,” he said. “I thought you'd be up here drinking the beer...”
    “Oh, you mean the fridge full of no beer?” I said. “I think you guys need to start cutting back. All I found in it was a mostly-empty pint of pineapple-coconut ice cream. I did find a ton of empty beer bottles, though...”
    He blinked, shaking his head again. “Yeah... but why? Why would you clean the loft?”
    I shrugged. “I was bored?”
    A noise at the bottom of the ladder, and Carter looked down, then scooted over. Kent's head popped up over the lip of the loft. His face betrayed no surprise, but his eyes narrowed as he surveyed me, on my hands and knees, wiping away years of grime and caked-on cigarette smoke.
    “Rebecca's cleaning is a compulsive reaction to stress,” he said mildly.
    Carter turned and looked at him. “What? How do you know that?”
    His mouth quirked. “She told me so herself.”
    “Shit,” Carter said. “If I cleaned when I got stressed I'd have the cleanest house in the universe. It'd be, like, all Japanese simplicity and shit.”
    “If your response to stress was cleaning, you'd be sober,” Kent said.
    Kent wasn't watching Carter's face, but I saw the wince there. “Yeah,” he muttered. “And then we'd all be broke.”
    Tension. Tension, tension, tension. If I could just get these baseboards clean...
    “Rebecca.” Kent's voice cut through my thoughts and I was mildly amused to find that I had been reaching for the closest