when she heard the first scream, she was gazing at the stars, drawn by their cold light as she had been since childhood, fascinated by the thought of distant worlds that might be barren and clean, free of pestilence. at first the muffled cry seemed to be only a memory, a fragment of a shrill argument from another strange house in the past, echoing across time. often, as a child, eager to hide from her mother and her mother ’ s friends when they were drunk or high, she climbed onto porch roofs or into backyard trees, slipped through windows onto fire escapes, away to secret places far from the fray, where she could study the stars and where voices raised in argument or sexual excitement or shrill drug - induced giddiness came to her as though from out of a radio, from faraway places and people who had no connection whatsoever with her life, hyperrealism, eerie lighting, daylight, foggy, autumn, west coast, 4 k, unreal engine, voxel