An old stone road climbed the treeless hill. It snuck into the driveway of a small house and crawled under the garage door. A wild wind accompanied it, howling in from the sea that was scratching deep crevices into the far side of the hill.

The house was only small if you were Alma Rosario-Okoye, six and a half feet tall, currently cornered in the garage by her two convertibles and the boxes stacked floor to ceiling. She scowled at the car in front of her, her face covered with purple splotches of paint – in fact, her whole right side was stained purple, down to the tips of her fingers wrapped around a can of royal purple spray paint. She aimed the can at the wall again and let it have another blast, eyes closed. Her phone was ringing. She started at the sound, and the blast turned into a streak. She ignored the phone. The white walls needed to go. The phone kept ringing.

She turned angrily, her fingers twitching, each spasm misting the closest car’s windshield with purple spatters. She swore and vaulted over both cars in a single motion, grabbing the phone with her free hand. “Hello, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. Why are you calling me?”

“Rough day, Alma?”

She turned and considered the work. Streaks of purple paint covered the wall in a chaotic maze^[1]. It was beautiful. The purple on the car’s windshield and purple fist print where she’d vaulted were less beautiful. She swore again.

A worried “Hello?” squawked from the phone.

“Yeah, Jeff, I’m here. Just painting my garage.”

“You finally got rid of all that junk?” Jeff’s voice sounded impressed.

Alma sighed. “I’ve told you before, it’s not junk. It’s important to me. All of it.”

“5,182 cardboard boxes aren’t important, they’re a fire hazard.”

Alma contemplated the garage. The boxes were organized into neat aisles. The garage was part of the rest of the house, along with the kitchen and pretty much all of the house except for the outside of it. The aisles of boxes filled some of the rest of the house, too, but she didn’t care. She tapped her chin thoughtfully, leaving a purple fingerprint on it. “5,183 now.”

“Alma, you’ve really got to get rid of…”

Alma hung up the phone. She set the paint can down, rinsed her hands in a bucket of mineral spirits, and stepped through the door into her living room. The new box was on the arm of the couch. She peered at the label: “GREG’S STUFF (RETURN TO GREG).”

She had absolutely no idea who Greg was, so she put the box on a stack of twenty others against the wall next to a window and wandered into the kitchen, wondering why she could hear the faint sound of a typewriter somewhere far away. She shrugged. It was time for a sandwich - something elegant, like beurre d’arachide with a nice orange conserve.

Her plans were thwarted by the realization that she lacked bread, so she slammed the empty pantry door and stomped off to change. She reemerged into the garage, her purple-splattered white coveralls replaced by a sharp purple pinstripe suit, and her car chirped at her. She pocketed the key fob, switched on the infrared lighting and backed away, turning the radio up. Her earplugs were purple, like her suit.

A few miles away, a seismic monitoring station picked up some unusual activity. The technician looked at the printout, and showed it to his boss. "Weird looking quake, it's a little too rhythmic to be natural. Must be a flaw in the monitor. Double check it, will you?" The technician scurried away. The boss peeled the wrapper from his tenth candy bar of the evening.

The grass on the treeless hill rippled in Alma’s wake, sonic waves pounding out from the subwoofer in her trunk. She’d found it in a box labeled “MINING EQUIPMENT,” which was strange, but whatever. She loved the drive to town. She always found it interesting to watch in her rearview mirror for the animals. Somehow that guy who did the nature show with the soothing voice always failed to point out that squirrels and rabbits could fly too. Something caught her eye. “Was that a deer?” she muttered, but it was too high for her to make it out ^[2], so she shrugged and kept driving. The subwoofer cut out when she was five minutes out from the town, but it always did that for some reason, so she turned the radio off with a sigh^[3].