(This is not part of the major work... when I have the urge to write in third person i'll continue writing this... )

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There’s no one at home. The niece is away on a music camp of sorts – the kind where an absence is noticed but not noted, where the goodbyes are appropriate, but not the meaning it. I suppose he loved her, but it didn’t really seem so at the time. Anyway, the girl was having an enjoyable enough existence regardless – she began to think of herself as an investment, of which the camp was a part of and to which few others would be participant. She breathed in, pleased that no one had yet reprimanded her for disappearing so often to the estuary, often an oboe or a boy in hand . The wind rustled through the reeds there, rather than screamed like it did through those of the new players.
The girlfriend, the little woman, or “Therese” as she would probably prefer to be introduced, isn’t around. Joseph notices a particularly tattered pink book out of the corner of his eye and flicks to the front page –
“Name your baby. Published in 1984”. He would prefer to say it than write it, and write it than think it, but sometimes there was no say in the matter.
Born in 1985, Joseph likes the what if. He pictures the chemical composition momentarily suspended above page 34, a predilection of which he was in part the product, and imagines it shifting slightly. It instead takes a liking to
[He writes down the name Finn.]
Joseph, who could have been Finn, also used to write down dates, and pretend they were the end of the world. Or to be precise, one date, again and again, in the back of every journal that was ever kept, the fading pencil tracing an ever sharpening peril: 16th September 2071. When the innocuous curves finally translated to reality, Joseph would drive off a cliff. Death, he figures, is a certain enough thing to believe in.
“Mm!” he remembers, picking up the pencil again:
Must Get License.

“I like the sounds here” she says.
“It’s nice”
“Except the insects”
Lily pokes the new boy’s head, separating the strands of hair from the sand, the two almost indistinguishable in colour. They laugh, not quite nervously. Dusting her hand on her pocket, Lily notices a threadbare red ribbon caught in the zipper. She ties it around his forehead, in anticipation of a wound. The reaction is quizzical, but the glimmer of a riddle in his eyes is so reflective of the sky that Lily can almost gaze straight through his head. And, she thinks, as though the rest of him were barely there either, the wind takes his newest of decorations. The pair watch the ribbon fold effortlessly into a laced curtain of blue.
“That was kind of cool” he says finally.