(n. the urge to look through people’s windows as you pass by their houses.)
It’s a peer into a life I’ve not led— a glance through houses of people unknown to me in a dark, sleepy, August town. At night, the illuminated pane squares are my television while they watch theirs: blue light infomercials and game show hosts. But as they watch the screen and I watch them, I wonder who watches me driving home. Never voyeuristic, only by chance as my car halts at the steel octagon or a red light’s doctrine, pedestrians to catch the pale liquid light of selves in a somnambulist’s obscure dreamworld elseways unseen, all in under a minute.
Leslie Benigni is originally a Pittsburgh native that traded concrete for cornfields to pursue her MFA at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her work has been published or forthcoming in :Lexicon, Athenaeum, and Roadrunner Review. Twitter & Instagram: @benignileslie.