Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

Outside the window there was snow falling, falling like movie snow, all the dreamy fluffy bits drifting around in the light of a single streetlamp . . . I watched the snow slow down, thin out. Then it was two or three pieces at a time, falling reversibly, wavering up and down and up again like they didn't know where to go.

I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels.

Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance.

Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during a operation.

In the advertisement, anonymous hands wielded shiny shiny blades that chopped through butter and animal bone as if they were the same thing, through ice and tendon and untreated wood as if there was no difference between anything in the world—only a slight variation in grain, visible once something has been split in half.

I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red.