Day 868

There's a part of the suburbs you can only access if you have a keycard for the iron gates that surround it. The houses inside look exactly the same as the rest of the area, all perfectly neat and always in line with the regulations. It's often used as the picture-perfect representation of what every home owner should aspire to live in.

The only foreseeable downside to that particular area of the suburbs is that it doesn't appear to have any residents, not at first glance. A local kid took it upon themself to mark the two bars you need to peer through in order to be able to see the home owners.His family moved out of the country a week later but that's apparently unrelated.

I must admit I was sceptic at first until my neighbour Julia dragged out there and made me look through those bars just to prove it wasn't a story. Sure enough I saw a man walk right past me but only through the bars, he just didn't seem to exist outside of them. For a brief moment I thought nobody would believe me if I told them but Julia was beside me looking all grim and understanding. 

She's gone now, of course. The last anyone heard of her was María who lived next door to her and often overheard her phone conversations. She says Julia was invited to dinner with one of the families in the fenced off area. Nobody saw her go in or out and a week later all of her things were being moved to her mother's address in Romania.

I find myself going back to those bars whenever I have a spare moment just to see if I can spy Julia over there. It's just that I have a sneaking suspicion that she never left, that she's still over there and that she can't get out. Maybe that's why the're all there, the strange people who can only be seen from one angle. They only ever face one direction too, like they're just cardboard models moving as people are supposed to.