The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni

able to comprehend it. But he was.
    “Not right now,” he said. “I can’t right now.”
    “I meant at some date in the future,” I said.
    “The future,” said Jared.
    “Yes,” I said. “The future.”
    “Maybe,” he said.
    “I’ll let you know agreeable times,” I said. “I can call you again and tell you some times.”
    Jared paused for a moment, and I heard him yelling out the doorway.
    “Relax, you ho-bag!” he screamed.
    Then his voice got so loud I couldn’t tell what he said.
    “Jared?”
    “Sorry. That was Meredith,” he said. “She wants her phone back.”
    “Do you have to terminate the conversation?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”
    His voice was much quieter now. I was standing in the murky light of the dome. I could see my reflection in the glass, looking back at me.
    “Let me ask you something,” he said. “What do you do for fun over there, Sebastian?”
    “Fun?” I said.
    “I mean, when you’re not telepathically communicating with your grandma.”
    “Well . . .” I said.
    “C’mon,” he interrupted. “You can’t always be doing weird shit in that globe. You have to have some free time. You have to have a day off.”
    “I climb sometimes,” I said. “I climb up on the roof.”
    “Really?” he asked. “You scale that mother?”
    “I have suction cups. It’s my task to clean the surface of the glass. Nana says it attracts more tourists.”
    “Sebastian,” he said, “that’s pretty fucking wicked.”
    “I asked for the coordinates to your house, remember?”
    “You can see my house from up there?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “I can see quite a vista.”
    There was another silence.
    “But you never go anywhere.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You never go any of the places that you watch.”
    “Not very often, no,” I said.
    “Yeah,” he said. He started to speak again, but then there was another shout from his end and I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear Meredith, who said, “Get off my phone with that weirdo, already!”
    Jared just sighed this time. “Okay, Sebastian,” he said. “I guess I have to go.”
    “I’ll call you with possible times,” I said.
    “Sure,” he said. “You do that. You call me with possible times.”
    The line went dead right after he spoke, and I removed the hot phone from my ear. I deposited the device back in its cradle, then looked around the room. The sun was completely gone now, and the woods were dark all around me. All I could see when I pressed my face to the glass were the few boughs extending over the dome like giant skeletal fingers. I suddenly found myself ravenous, faint even. I walked over to my cold dinner and began forking it mechanically into my mouth, shoveling huge bites with my spoon, holding the food down with my thumb. The greens crunched, bitter and fibrous. The polenta was a bursting mouthful of mush. By the time I thought to sit down, everything had been consumed.
    My chest ached. But it was not from the food. It had started bothering me soon after I put the phone down. I pressed a hand to my sternum and left it there a moment. I took a few deep breaths and let them out slowly. I walked a slow lap around the room. Improbably, it wasn’t until Nana walked in the door a few minutes later that I realized what was bothering me: I’d forgotten what loneliness felt like. But now it had moved from the far reaches of my mind, where it usually sat, to a cramped place just beneath my ribs. I could feel it swelling in my chest.
    “Are you okay?” asked Nana, stepping inside. “Why do you look like that?”
    “Like what?” I said.
    She brushed past me and picked up my plate from the sink.
    “Nana?” I said.
    I looked at her arm then. There was a puncture where they had drawn blood at the hospital. The skin around the small wound was yellow and purple.
    “Yes?” she said.
    She was sweating, and her hand shook almost imperceptibly while she ran water over my plate.
    “I can do that,”