When Kate was eleven, her father inexplicably decided she should have a gerbil. He was in her bedroom setting up a very elaborate habitat when I came home from work, a surprise.

I remember seeing him with the clarity of long absence, and I saw at once that he was no longer quite sane.

Out of the void of eight years, and there he suddenly was, holding a gerbil house.

He disappeared again that afternoon back into the ether from which he'd come, and he reappeared when Kate graduated from high school. By then the gerbil and its multi-tubed home had long ago been traded for a cat.