A deep, white light. Yonju had the sense of something small subsisting and waiting for the opportune moment. She woke up and edged her way into the living room, where she encountered it for the first time outside of the pink haze of slumber.
   "What is your relationship to seeing things?"
   That was her overture to Minji the following day in the shipping container.
   Minji said, "Have some fruit."
   The shipping container was their branch's new canteen, but they did not prefer it to eating at their desks. Yonju took the blushing pear from Minji's hand. It felt soft, coy.
   "Seeing things?"
   They sat down.
   "Yes."
   Minji made a cute, oscillating motion with her thin shoulders, which Yonju would have identified in anyone else as bristling, but knew had more, in Minji's case, to do with deep focus.
   "I don't believe in ghosts."
   It was a cloudy day, but an adamant beam of milky light nevertheless battered them from the sole window, which was above them and at Minji's back. Minji had, in her ergonomic taupe lunchbox, the steaming rice cakes that her partner had prepared for her that morning, glossy orange and succulent.
   "Not ghosts," Yonju began, but then she thought.
   Part of her recollection was about the tedious dream that she had been having beforehand. Possibly, it had been about her mother. She and her mother had been cleaning out her mother's wardrobe together prior to a baseless move, and, in the dream, she had kept folding and unfolding the same pair of nude stockings anxiously over the coverlet. Her mother, moderately unrecognizable as people often are in dreams, stood in front of the wardrobe, expectant, but not, for once, in a hurry.
   What a ghost represented to Yonju was senseless urgency. But the presence in her kitchen did not seem in any way ambitious, unless that was how one interpreted the fact that, day by day, it became a little bit bigger. Then she realized that what she was thinking of was growth.
   "What do you mean?" Minji asked.
   Yonju equivocated.
   "I mean I think that I'm experiencing burnout."
   She, Minji, and the four other interns had spent every evening of the previous week gathering fur coats, crossing out names, recording videos, delivering short messages, picking up trash, answering rhetorical questions, serving drinks, seating people, smiling, scrubbing blots from the edges of scarves, running to the pharmacy, and standing around at what Remy was calling a colloquium. Remy was a senior partner at the boutique consultancy that they worked for: Allicors.
   "But why? Your job isn't that difficult."
   "I think that's why."
   It had been a colloquium with champagne and truffle-salt on the topic of self-care in the corporate environment for thirty propertied women who no longer needed either advice or education. Remy gave the sole and therefore the keynote address. It was the only annual gathering at Allicors that was geared toward women professionals. Everyone was unkind to them.
   "Oh. Yes, but you can't let it get to you. I see what you mean now."
   They ate their lunch in about twenty minutes, lacking even the morale to drag it out. In all that time, no one joined them in the shipping container. Many of the interns avoided lunch like the plague.
   Stepping back outside was like stepping into a live soundstage. Minji left her with a salient piece of advice.
   "Do you watch porn? Porn can be a great way to blow off steam - as long as you're not anxious."
⋰
   "I've spent too much time on the internet. I think that's why I really struggle to interact meaningfully with people in my age group. And our cousins, I almost can't even speak to."
   Yonju was recording a voice note for her older brother while she waited for her microwaved dinner to cool down. Their cousins were five and six years younger than them respectively. The pulsing, white orb had migrated to her living room, such as it was. This unforeseen reconfiguration was what had led to their first (accidental) physical contact. Astonishingly, the orb was damp.
   When Yonju walked by it, as she was doing now repeatedly as part of an experiment, she had the urge to roll up the hems of her trousers. And yet whatever it emitted was not water; it dried instantly. It seemed to be nothing more and nothing less than a pool of itself, of its own bluff light.
   "Loneliness has almost always been a human problem," Her brother replied in an easeful tone, which Yonju thought must be a symptom of living on the other side of the world.
   She dabbled her index finger in the pearly space where the orb began to curve inward, and it came out glossy and warm. But the fluid vanished even before she could lift it to her face to smell it. She inspected her interphalangeal creases and thought that she could discern some kind of faint glitter there.
   "It wouldn't help if more people knew that," She responded, feeling like a jerk and crouching to pat her threadbare rug. It was as dry as sand. "Most people have never, ever known anything else."
   She heaved herself up to retrieve her meal of spaghetti and caponata, whose aroma was so negligible that she involuntarily quailed at the first sinister bite, which she of course took on her feet. And then she went to sit behind the orb on her depressed corduroy couch. She made sure to sit well within its milky range.
   She was not a spiritual person. She flattered herself that she would not, under any circumstances, report a UFO if she ever saw one. But there was something to be said for a humble visitation within a crisis of self-trust. That is, Yonju felt that the orb was trying to say something. It was the kind of event that took place in novels, and she had once tried to write novels.
   Granted, this was not that world - this was not the world in which anyone did what she wanted - but it was close enough. She had no friends, no one to keep her sane. Minji took care of her at work reflexively, but unconsciously hated it when she stood up for herself. Yonju, according to her own misshapen self-image, was the holder of two online degrees and the heiress of all the world's broken governments.
   But when she looked into its core, she lost the impression of dinginess, fear, and ennui that overhung everything else, though she could still see the outline of her stolid credenza - the only contribution that she had allowed her parents to make to this apartment, other than rent. The wood veneer was peeling off. She hadn't known that it was a veneer when she moved in. This was a world altogether without glass, mammoth texts, and tall buildings.
   The cool, creamy vista actually reminded her of not having been anxious - of being ill as a child and of things that she had actually been right about. Was she seeing things, and, if yes, how could she keep it up? She knew by now that her brother was not going to respond. He had told her that he was going to a rave in the city. Yonju's mind wandered, but, even when her mind wandered, she could feel it.
⋰
   At eleven o'clock, Yonju saw the man that she was seeing. She invited him over.
   "I don't know what you mean."
   This was in response to a question of his. They stood in her living room, which seemed, as Yonju noticed for the first time in his presence, excessively somber and dark red in tone because of the cool mass hovering at its center. It throbbed. She was now certain that it was a source of some kind, a font of what Yonju could only interpret as pure wellbeing. What he had asked was, "Are you serious?"
   When they talked about it later, what he admitted he thought it probably was was a flying saucer.
   "What? But it looks nothing like one."
   He turned on the lamp, though they didn't need it, because only a long sheer separated her bed from her living room, and the globe-being phosphoresced through that fabric capably.
   "No, I know. But neither do flying saucers."
   "I don't understand what you're saying."
   They were ensconced in jewel-toned textiles which Yonju had brought from Lagos. A makeshift adire canopy hung from a massive hook that had protruded from the ceiling of one end of the studio since she moved in and circled them. That hook had been the very first thing that caught her eye when she toured the unfurnished, gloomy, and costly space, smiling rustily.
   "Kenneth Arnold, who is the person who coined that phrase - sorry, whose description led to its coinage - was describing the movement of the UFO, and not its shape. And so, really, what a flying saucer is is a misunderstanding. Which is like your situation."
   She fidgeted under her red and blue quilt. In a way, he was right.
   "What am I supposed to do?"
   He shrugged one giant, warm shoulder.
   "Right now, a lot of strange things are happening."
   Yonju agreed and felt downcast. She knew that there had been other apparitions in her personal history, but she couldn't bring them clearly to mind at this moment. She had been having some problems with her memory.
   "People are lonely," Deji went on. "It hailed in my classroom the other day. My roommate is dating a piece of software that can speak his language."
   "What do you mean?"
   She was interested as much by his baffling words as by his tone of voice, which was slightly less matter-of-fact than usual. She investigated the deep shadows of his profile.
   "It can speak Itsekiri. That's what it's called, isn't it? And it's meant to be therapeutic. You know, his twin brother went on a hike when they were undergraduates and disappeared," Yonju nodded, for he had told her this before. "During that period, his parents had this company make an app out of his digital footprint - a chatbot - and so he's used to it."
   Yonju contemplated the chatbot. She knew about the digital afterlife industry, and she had met her lover's roommate once before. He had been cooking soup in their apartment and didn't greet her. Like her, he had Itsekiri parents. Like Deji, he was a PhD candidate in an obscure subfield of computer science at the local university, but from what Yonju understood, he also was, for hazy reasons, far less likely to get a job there after he left. Did he seem like the type of person who would forfeit self-actualization and fulfillment? Or had he always struggled to look other people in the eye?
   "And the hail?" She wondered.
   "That one, I can't explain, because only a handful of my students noticed it."
   That weekend, Yonju purchased a thick selenite wand and asked Minji to activate it for her.
   "No. You have to be the one to do it."