The drive home from work usually takes about twenty minutes, five of those on a major highway that cuts between two semi-large towns, not quite cities, though perhaps to those who come from places where smaller towns are referred to as cities, they would be cities then to them. The last fifteen minutes are spent on various side streets, back alleys, neighborhood pathways and extension cut-throughs. Typically, there’s traffic. Sometimes I like to see us all in traffic together  and imagine us without our cars, and I think how that might make a great commercial, and then I feel bad about myself for thinking that. Today, I left work later than usual. I had to stay for something, I can’t remember. When I drove home, there was nobody. The sky and the roads looked the same with the music as loud as I’d turned it. When I got home nobody had touched the small flower I had placed on a railing near my house that morning. People aren’t so simple, I thought. But I mean it. Really. There was nobody at all.