A crowd

It was a cold summer. Alexsis was spending many days by a lamp accompanied by cool, dry air, and priceless artifacts.

It was a knack he had, but not a talent. Going outside in sweltering heat meant heavy pockets and living in an old area of a young country meant that he could find puzzle pieces of previous lives.

Cooking pottery felt like his cast iron pan while the perfume bottle sized seed pots ancestored the packets of seeds he would see at gardening stores. As scattered stories began to build on his desk, it was like opening a box of old toys.

Nostalgia comes from familiarity but, Alexsis felt people focus only on aesthetic differences. With each dead language he read and each piece of new "discovered" information, he felt a familiarity.

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It was a dry, arid night for Ritu. The mood peeked into a single occupied room, curtains puffed like sails on a drifting ship.

Each day she would come back to a new house, things moved and histories changed. She didn't feel that it was her house to live in anymore. She looked as much as she could and couldn't find a real answer, sometimes her parents had made sweets, sometimes they never existed, and sometimes the urns were heavy. The world went a little unsteady around her and sometimes she would just appear in a new place. It wasn't an understatement to say she felt haunted.