New York City, November 30, 2014

★★ The brightness of the morning was a taunting fakeout, a ten-dollar bill on an invisible fishing line. Clouds closed in, and though the bitter cold was gone, the bleak light was back in place. A woman remonstrated with her companion in the elevator for his having let her set out in a fur coat. But the three-year-old’s hands, sticking out of the sleeve of his hoodie, went chilly in the time it took to go pick up hot dogs. A pigeon drank from a puddle clogged with leaves, the dark water sooty and tannic. It wasn’t worth the effort to watch out for the moment the ruin of daytime finished prematurely collapsing into night.