New York City, November 22, 2015

★★ The gray sheets of cloud were interestingly rumpled and torn but beyond them was nothing but more sheets of more gray. The brief day never had a chance. A housefly, still alive in the unfreezing days, bumbled into the kitchen, then to the bathroom, where it should have been easy to find but was not — to appear, much later, near the huge pomegranate on the table an instant after the pen wrote “A housefly.” Some of the deep autumn flies had been so sluggish they could be knocked out of the air with a hand, but this one sustained a high-summer vanishing act. The curdled clouds stayed and stayed over Manhattan, though they went into plain flat gray in a line not far into New Jersey, and far away in the northeast a stripe of pink held through the afternoon. Outside was dimness and chill. Empty lumber racks awaited the annual burden of dead evergreens; people were willing to line up in the cold outside the Bloomingdale’s outlet trying its luck where the Urban Outfitters had been. In the midst of the piano lesson, a sudden lilac light pushed its way into the room. The gray had finally shredded after all. An ugly flat glass building stood plated in brilliant copper. Vibrant pink scraps moved rapidly under a sky of electric blue.