Hollow Man was hitching his pants up on Chambersburg Street, in front of the Heritage Room bar, but he hadn’t gone in yet. Or, maybe, he just came out. I couldn’t tell.

“You going to the Blossom Fair?” he yelled at me. “If so, you’re too late.”

He looked out that way to the west. I did too. Something was coming. Something was shimmering out by the orchards, where black dirt tucked itself under the trees like a wet shirt; where the apples and pears and cherries were all just barely sprouting, blushing, twisting up into the hems of the trees. Night was descending softly like a blue drape all around them. There were miles and miles of trees out there. There were miles, and miles, and miles of trees out there.

My new friend scratched his ear and blood came out, black cherry-blood. It dribbled down to his stubbled chin.

“Yes, the Blossom Fair. You missed it! They had this big barn. And a square dance. And me and my brothers. And girls, and girls. A square dance, goddamned you. They tried to teach me, my brothers, the dance. They tried to teach me, but my feet ain’t worth shit.”

Hollow Man looked down at worn shoes and re-hitched those pants.

“Now it ain’t no-place,” Hollow Man said, talking sideways again, toward the darkening orchards. “The banks took care of that. Bought up the farmers, my brothers, my brothers.

Ate up the farms and then chewed on their bones. Them orchards, they sewed them together like skins. And that dance, I told you. That dance? That barn? Used to have a hex sign to ward of the spirits. Just a bonfire of splinters now, waiting to burn.” That shimmer of light I’d seen was growing, pink on purple, like it was coming for us.

“Well, sorry you missed it. It sure was something, that fair. Now it’s nothing.”

I turned to go, but then it happened--the wind. The wind hit like a furnace of warm air passing through us, and then it snowed petals, little blossom petals, plastered the sidewalk, the windows, the headlights, howling all around, stuck to clothes, with the stink of apples.

“Well, ain’t that something,” I think I said to Hollow Man.

But Hollow Man was already gone. He was standing there, staring down at his shoes, in the glow of the Rheingold sign buzzing from the Heritage Room window. His shoes were caked in blossoms. He was shuffling his feet, slowly, trying to remember the dance.

Frank Haberle is the author of two books: Shufflers(Flexible Press, Minneapolis, September 1 2021), a story of 1980s transients; and Downlanders (Flexible Press, November 2023), following five lost souls into a fictional wilderness.