Melissa woke up on the front porch, wedged on a lumpy couch, the top of her skull pressing into the wicker ridge of an armrest. She had a blurred recollection of moving outside in the middle of the night after tossing and turning for sleepless hours in her bed. On the porch, she had not only slept, but slept in – the day was underway, and she was surrounded by the clacking of outsized autumn insects. She opened her eyes to a jaunty splatter of sunflowers nodding over the railing. A single shiny black ant marched vertically up a hairy green stalk. Closer to where she lay, mottled brown spiders lurked in corners, waiting in dense white webs to trap their meals. A late-season honeybee was nestled in the brown centre of a sunflower, directly in Melissa’s line of sight. She gazed at the bee, an
