A solar flare. A shooting star. Raging & raving, the fellow topples across the road into the home of an old woman with two yelping dogs. Whether she asks him in or can’t keep him out isn’t recorded in the formal inquiry. Go, she says, but he won’t. Mosquito, black fly, deer tick. He grabs her phone when she says she’ll dial 911. He runs next door where an old man lets him in though his wife protests. She knows what the fellow’s up to, drunk & disorderly. He wants more drink & a shoulder to cry on. Brown bats sweep the roofline. She calls the police, because what do you do when someone needs help, someone who’s a neighbor surely, but not family, not a friend, only a local, an aging man, parents dead, wife gone, children if any grown & out of state, a broken branch of a bleeding heart. He needs what can’t be had since priests have failed & police can’t replace them. This two-bit town in our soon-to-fail nation has no store, no bar, no rest house, no soup kitchen, no place to go day or night. Drunk & disorderly sirens yowl, blue lights blaze. The fellow is a local. What good is being a local if here includes no community to take you in?