Apartment Overlooking the Park

Her room overlooks a park with two ball-fields and the evenings pose as summer by mid spring. Basking, rich, golden sunlight glances off windows shining over the grass, diffusing in the atmosphere as if a spell had been cast, of loose churned dirt kicked up from the base-paths and hung like a web from the corners of the buildings over the whole park, while the chatter of co-ed teams cheering their mate at bat never quite dies away as she allows herself to stroll home from work. She listens from the tiny kitchen where she cooks her dinner, pausing with her mouth open wide from reading silently aloud in strange languages one worn book or another, to peer at the branches and the families walking in the darkening evenings over a lightly sweating bottle of beer. In the living room she keeps a circle of cold-wrought iron wire set into the floor in a ring carved in the dark wood and sealed with wax scented with myrrh poured from white and red candles. Among other purposes the wax keeps the dog from playing with the ring and disrupting the circle much to both creatures’ – the dog and the thing in the circle – chagrin.