#insiders outside

The children in this neighborhood are savage; I'm not going up against them for anything:

Graveyards, like military bases, are often excellent places to look for rare species and ecosystems. Recently, a twenty-five-acre remnant of tall-grass prairie was discovered in a cemetary in urban St. Louis.

For days after I saw the estate agent's sign, I thought about it. I knew that for the person subject to systemic, persistent and habitual worrying, a water-filled quarry might be an unwise purchase. As it is, I dream of floods. I look out of the window in the rain at the ponds gathering at the corner of the street. I pass the Denburn where it flows under the road and listen to the volume of its rushing, and lean over the railings where I can try to gauge how much rain would be needed to fill it up to overflowing. I do this without owning the quarry. If I bought the quarry, I would dream of accidental drownings, of mass suicides, of horrors as yet unformed even in my febrile brain. I would imagine infestations, irruptions, algal blooms and toxic gases. I would have dreams of monsters rising, serpents, water-wraiths, the entire city inundated, water flowing through the streets, a quarry-led disaster movie. If I bought the quarry, I would never sleep again.